After seeing many complaints about certain DOMDocument shortcomings, such as bad handling of encodings and always saving HTML fragments with <html>, <head>, and DOCTYPE, I decided that a better solution is needed.
So here it is: SmartDOMDocument. You can find it at http://beerpla.net/projects/smartdomdocument/
Currently, the main highlights are:
- SmartDOMDocument inherits from DOMDocument, so it's very easy to use - just declare an object of type SmartDOMDocument instead of DOMDocument and enjoy the new behavior on top of all existing functionality (see example below).
- saveHTMLExact() - DOMDocument has an extremely badly designed "feature" where if the HTML code you are loading does not contain <html> and <body> tags, it adds them automatically (yup, there are no flags to turn this behavior off).
Thus, when you call $doc->saveHTML(), your newly saved content now has <html><body> and DOCTYPE in it. Not very handy when trying to work with code fragments (XML has a similar problem).
SmartDOMDocument contains a new function called saveHTMLExact() which does exactly what you would want - it saves HTML without adding that extra garbage that DOMDocument does.
- encoding fix - DOMDocument notoriously doesn't handle encoding (at least UTF-8) correctly and garbles the output.
SmartDOMDocument tries to work around this problem by enhancing loadHTML() to deal with encoding correctly. This behavior is transparent to you - just use loadHTML() as you would normally.
- SmartDOMDocument Object As String - you can use a SmartDOMDocument object as a string which will print out its contents.
For example:
<?php
echo "Here is the HTML: $smart_dom_doc";
?>
I'm going to maintain this code and try to fix bugs as they come in.
Enjoy.