PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser: FAQ

# PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser

## FAQ

- Back
- Problem with finding
- Problem with hosting
- Behind a proxy
- Memory leak!

## Problem with finding

Top
Q: Element not found in such case:
$html->find('div[style=padding: 0px 2px;] span[class=rf]');
A: If there is blank in selectors, quote it!
$html->find('div[style="padding: 0px 2px;"] span[class=rf]');

## Problem with hosting

Top
Q: On my local server everything works fine, but when I put it on my esternal server it doesn't work.
A: The "file_get_dom" function is a wrapper of "file_get_contents" function, you must set "allow_url_fopen" as TRUE in "php.ini" to allow accessing files via HTTP or FTP. However, some hosting venders disabled PHP's "allow_url_fopen" flag for security issues... PHP provides excellent support for "curl" library to do the same job, Use curl to get the page, then call "str_get_dom" to create DOM object.
Example:
$curl = curl_init();
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://????????');
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 10);
$str = curl_exec($curl);
curl_close($curl);
$html= str_get_html($str);
...

## Behind a proxy

Top
Q: My server is behind a Proxy and i can't use file_get_contents b/c it returns a unauthorized error.
A: Thanks for Shaggy to provide the solution:
// Define a context for HTTP.
$context = array
(
'http' => array
(
'proxy' => 'addresseproxy:portproxy', // This needs to be the server and the port of the NTLM Authentication Proxy Server.
'request_fulluri' => true,
),
);
$context = stream_context_create($context);
$html= file_get_html('http://www.php.net', false, $context);
...

## Memory leak!

Top
Q: This script is leaking memory seriously... After it finished running, it's not cleaning up dom object properly from memory..
A: Due to php5 circular references memory leak, after creating DOM object, you must call $dom->clear() to free memory if call file_get_dom() more then once.
Example:
$html = file_get_html(...);
// do something...
$html->clear();
unset($html);
Author: S.C. Chen (me578022@gmail.com)
Original idea is from Jose Solorzano's HTML Parser for PHP 4.
Contributions by: Yousuke Kumakura, Vadim Voituk, Antcs