Login/Register
Parsing of badly formatted HTML in PHP [closed]
Asked Answered
Solved phphtmlparsingsax
I

4

9

In my code I convert some styled xls document to html using openoffice. I then parse the tables using xml_parser_create. The problem is that openoffice creates oldschool html with unclosed <BR> and <HR> tags, it doesn't create doctypes and don't quote attributes <TABLE WIDTH=4>.

The php parsers I know off don't like this, and yield xml formatting errors. My current solution is to run some regexes over the file before I parse it, but this is neither nice nor fast.

Do you know a (hopefully included) php-parser, that doesn't care about these kinds of mistakes? Or perhaps a fast way to fix a 'broken' html?

Idiom answered 28/2, 2010 at 15:37 Comment(0)
L
9

A solution to "fix" broken HTML could be to use HTMLPurifier (quoting) :

HTML Purifier is a standards-compliant HTML filter library written in PHP.
HTML Purifier will not only remove all malicious code (better known as XSS) with a thoroughly audited, secure yet permissive whitelist, it will also make sure your documents are standards compliant


An alternative idea might be to try loading your HTML with [`DOMDocument::loadHTML`][2] *(quoting)* :

The function parses the HTML contained in the string source . Unlike loading XML, HTML does not have to be well-formed to load.

And if you're trying to load HTML from a file, see DOMDocument::loadHTMLFile.

Lair answered 28/2, 2010 at 15:40 Comment(5)
+1 for introduction htmlpurifier. one may look at simplehtmldom.sourceforge.net too. – Gisborne
The purifier is nice, but feels like kinda overkill for the problem. Same thing goes for the DOMParser. Is it not correct, that it will require a lot more time and ram than a simple sax parser? – Idiom
Maybe it will require more RAM, and possibly time ; but it will do more than a simple SAX parse, that would only read data, and not repair it ;;; and I'd say a SAX parser will only be able to read valid XML -- while HTMLPurifier and DOMDocument::loadHTML are both able to read "broken" HTML. – Lair
Because my errors are always generated by the same engine, and thus fairly predictable, I've coded the parser using simple regex. I know about #1732848 and I am very thankful for pointing me to these two great tools. – Idiom
If you can "predict" the errors, I guess that's OK :-) You're welcome :-) – Lair
Z
4

There is SimpleHTML

For repairing broken HTML, you could use Tidy.

As an alternative you can use the native XML Reader. Because it is acts as a cursor going forward on the document stream and stopping at each node on the way, it will not break on invalid XML documents.

See http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-pullparsingphp.html

Zizith answered 28/2, 2010 at 15:40 Comment(1)
+1 for Tidy. I find it's more robust at it's job than SimpleHTML. 2 separate tools for 2 different jobs really. – Sosanna
I
1

Any particular reason you're still using the PHP 4 XML API?

If you can get away with using PHP 5's XML API, there are two possibilities.

First, try the built-in HTML parser. It's really not very good (it tends to choke on poorly formatted HTML), but it might do the trick. Have a look at DomDocument::LoadHTML.

Second option - you could try the HTML parser based on the HTML5 parser specification:

http://code.google.com/p/html5lib/

This tends to work better than the built-in PHP HTML parser. It loads the HTML into a DomDocument object.

Internecine answered 28/2, 2010 at 16:27 Comment(1)
I'd rather not use a dom parser, as the document is quite big. (And I've already written tons of code for the sax) – Idiom
C
0

A solution is to use DOMDocument.

Example :

$str = "
<html>
 <head>
  <title>test</title>
 </head>
 <body>
  </div>error.
  <p>another error</i>
 </body>
</html>
";

$doc = new DOMDocument();
@$doc->loadHTML($str);
echo $doc->saveHTML();

Advantage : natively included in PHP, contrary to PHP Tidy.

Coffeecolored answered 11/1, 2017 at 10:34 Comment(0)

© 2022 - 2024 — McMap. All rights reserved.