QueryPath

QueryPath is a tool for manipulating HTML and XML documents in PHP using a chainable interface. It is similar to jQuery in that respect.

A typical QueryPath script looks something like this:

<?php
require_once 'QueryPath/QueryPath.php';
 
qp(QueryPath::HTML_STUB)->find('body')->text('Hello World')->writeHTML();
?>

The first line simply requires the library.

The second line opens an HTML stub document (which contains the basic HTML you would need to create a new document), navigates the document's body, and then sets the title to Hello World. Finally, the full HTML is written to the browser.

Here's a more complex QueryPath routine, this time showing several of the QueryPath methods:

<?php
require_once 'QueryPath/QueryPath.php';
 
// Begin with an HTML stub document (XHTML, actually), and navigate to the title.
qp(QueryPath::HTML_STUB, 'title')
  // Add some text to the title
  ->text('Example of QueryPath.')
  // Now look for the <body> element
  ->find(':root body')
  // Inside the body, add a title and paragraph.
  ->append('<h1>This is a test page</h1><p>Test text</p>')
  // Now we select the paragraph we just created inside the body
  ->children('p')
  // Add a 'class="some-class"' attribute to the paragraph
  ->attr('class', 'some-class')
  // And add a style attribute, too, setting the background color.
  ->css('background-color', '#eee')
  // Now go back to the paragraph again
  ->parent()
  // Before the paragraph and the title, add an empty table.
  ->prepend('<table id="my-table"></table>')
  // Now let's go to the table...
  ->find('#my-table')
  // Add a couple of empty rows
  ->append('<tr></tr><tr></tr>')
  // select the rows (both at once)
  ->children()
  // Add a CSS class to both rows
  ->addClass('table-row')
  // Now just get the first row (at position 0)
  ->eq(0)
  // Add a table header in the first row
  ->append('<th>This is the header</th>')
  // Now go to the next row
  ->next()
  // Add some data to this row
  ->append('<td>This is the data</td>')
  // Write it all out as HTML
  ->writeHTML();
?>

On this blog, I will occasionally write about various uses of QueryPath.

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