Comments on: Generating (X)HTML Documents Using DOMDocument In PHP

By: Matthijs Kooijman

Matthijs Kooijman — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 17:17:17 +0000

Woops, never mind the final remark in my previous comment: Adding children to the DomDocument object seems to work, but actually adds the head and body tags _after_ the html object, not inside.

Anyway, I just noticed that DomDocument has a “documentElement” property, that does actually contain the HTML element. So the code would be:

$html = $document->documentElement;
$html->appendChild($head);
$html->appendChild($body);

By: Matthijs Kooijman

Matthijs Kooijman — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 12:21:58 +0000

Hi Steve,

good to see I’m not the only one trying this cool stuff

Anyway, I had some problems with your example, running on PHP 5.3 with the error reporting cranked all the way up:

Non-static method DOMImplementation::createDocumentType() should not be called statically, assuming $this from incompatible context

Seems like the DomImplementation methods aren’t static methods, so you’ll need to create an instance first. This snippet works for me:

// Create document
$impl = new DOMImplementation();
$doctype = $impl->createDocumentType(‘html’,
‘-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN’,
‘http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd‘);
$document = $impl->createDocument(‘http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml',
‘html’, $doctype);

Also, I’ve found that there’s an easy way to access the root “html” element: Just use the document itself. Since DOMDocument is a subclass of DOMNode, you can just add elements to it direclty:

$document->appendChild($head);
$document->appendChild($body);

By: Steve

Steve — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 18:07:30 +0000

When you want to create an empty textarea, you just need to set its contents to an empty string. $textarea = $document->createElement('textarea', ''); should produce the correct results. Edit: Looks like we posted at the same time. What I posted is basically a shortcut to adding a text node.

By: David Miles

David Miles — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 18:00:39 +0000

I spoke too soon …
After taking another look at it and looking at how the form element had proper tags, I had an idea and it worked. Here’s what I did:
$textarea = $document->createElement(‘textarea’);
$textarea->setAttribute(‘cols’, ’50′);
$textarea->setAttribute(‘rows’, ’5′);
$textarea->setAttribute(‘name’, ‘comments’);
$blank = $document->createTextNode(”);
$textarea->appendChild($blank);

By adding a blank textnode to it, it made it create both tags. Simple fix.

Anyways, thanks again!

By: David Miles

David Miles — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 17:51:35 +0000

Hey Steve,
I want to first thank you for the great example here! Documentation for DOMDocument is scarce and it’s really hard to find any conclusive articles on generating XHTML with it, so your article was very useful.
I will note that the static calls to createDocument() and createElement() will trigger a Strict warning in PHP 5.3 since they aren’t static methods, but that’s an easy fix.

The problem I’m having is when generating some form field types, mainly the textarea. textarea fields must have a closing tag “” and cannot be closed like some of the others. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem saveXML() realizes this and therefore creates incorrect textarea tags. I haven’t tried any of the others, so I’m not sure, but “input” fields work fine and so does “form”.

Do you have any ideas on this?
Thanks.

By: Modifying Templates Using DOMDocument In PHP | UltraMega

Modifying Templates Using DOMDocument In PHP | UltraMega — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 17:20:43 +0000

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