Month: April 2014

Music from Our Tube; “In the Dirt” by S. Carey

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I’ve had “In the Dirt” in my YouTube favorites for some time, but forgot about it until I heard it at the end of an episode of “The Good Wife“;

S. Carey - "In The Dirt" (Official Video)
Watch this video on YouTube.

Sean Carey is the drummer and supporting vocalist of Bon Iver, which puts this song right into context. The almost harsh percussive force and sometimes weird rhythms contrast beautifully with the piano and the layered voices. And there’s some warm woodwind & viola in to even things out.

Some HTML DOM parsing gotchas in PHP’s DOMDocument

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Although I had used Simple HTML DOM parser for WP DoNotTrack, I’ve been looking into native PHP HTML DOM parsing as a possible replacement for regular expressions for Autoptimize as proposed by Arturo. I won’t go into the performance comparison results just yet, but here’s some of the things I learned while experimenting with DOMDocument which in turn might help innocent passers-by of this blogpost.

  • loadHTML doesn’t always play nice with different character encodings, you might need something like mb_convert_encoding to work around that.
  • loadHTML will try to “repair” your HTML to make sure an XML-parser can work with it. So what goes in will not come out the same way.
  • loadHTML will spit out tons of warnings or notices about the HTML not being XML; you might want to suppress error-reporting by prepending the command with an @ (e.g. @$dom->loadHTML($htmlstring);)
  • If you use e.g. getELementsByTagName to extract nodes into a seperate DomNodeList and you want to use that to change the DomDocument can result in … unexpected behavior as the DomNodeList gets updated when changes are made to the DomDocument. Copy the DomNodes from the DomNodeList into a new array (which will not get altered) and iterate over that to update the DomDocument as seen in the example below.
  • removeChild is a method of DomNode, not of DomDocument. This means $dom->removeChild(DomNode) will not work. Instead invoke removeChild on the parent of the node you want to remove as seen in the example below
// loadHTML from string, suppressing errors
$dom = new DOMDocument();
@$dom->loadHTML($html);
// get all script-nodes
$_scripts=$dom->getElementsByTagName("script");
// move the result form a DomNodeList to an array
$scripts = array();
foreach ($_scripts as $script) {
   $scripts[]=$script;
}
// iterate over array and remove script-tags from DOM
foreach ($scripts as $script) {
   $script->parentNode->removeChild($script);
}
// write DOM back to the HTML-string
$html = $dom->saveHTML();

Now chop chop, back to my code to finish that performance comparison. Who know what else we’ll learn 😉