How PHP DomDocument Class Will Be Improved in PHP 8.4 to Parse and Serialize Better HTML5 Documents

In this article you will learn:

1. Why PHP Developers Need a Good HTML Parser Extension

2. What the PHP DOMDocument Class Does

3. How PHP 8.4 Will Be Improved to Provide Better Support to Parse and Process HTML5 Pages and Files

This image above is based on PHP 8 logo design by Vincent Pointier.

1. Why PHP Developers Need a Good HTML Parser Extension

We all know that HTML is the language used to define the contents of Web pages.

When you need to obtain information on a Web page of a given site, you can retrieve the HTML contents and the Web page and then use a parser to process the page and return the structure of HTML tags on the page.

A good HTML parser will help developers quickly implement tasks that can traverse the HTML document structure and extract the content you want from the HTML page.

2. What the PHP DOMDocument Class Does

The DOMDocument class can be used to parse XML documents in general. HTML can be parsed to be treated as XML documents.

The DOMDocument class has functions called loadHTML and loadHTMLFile that can parse HTML documents and return a tree of nodes of tags that represent the document. This tree of nodes can be easily traversed with PHP code to examine the elements of an HTML page.

3. How PHP 8.4 Will Be Improved to Provide Better Support to Parse and Process HTML5 Pages and Files

PHP 8.4 will introduce a new class named HTMLDocument XXX that will allow developers to create new HTML document objects from scratch using the createEmpty function, or from an HTML string using the createFromString or from an HTML file using the function createFromFile function.

These changes in PHP 8.4 will be backward compatible with previous PHP 8.3. So, applications that use the DOMDocument class will continue to work as in past PHP versions.

Here is the structure of classes that will be available in PHP 8.4 to manipulate HTML and XML documents based on the original proposal to introduce the HTMLDocument class in PHP 8.4:

namespace DOM {
  // The base abstract document class
  abstract class Document extends DOM\Node implements DOM\ParentNode {
    /* all properties and methods that are common and sensible for both XML & HTML documents */
  }

  final class XMLDocument extends Document {
    /* insert specific XML methods and properties (e.g. xmlVersion, validate(), ...) here */

    private function __construct() {}

    public static function createEmpty(string $version = "1.0", string $encoding = "UTF-8"): XMLDocument;
    public static function createFromFile(string $path, int $options = 0, ?string $override_encoding = null): XMLDocument;
    public static function createFromString(string $source, int $options = 0, ?string $override_encoding = null): XMLDocument;
  }

  final class HTMLDocument extends Document {
    /* insert specific Html methods and properties here */

    private function __construct() {}

    public static function createEmpty(string $encoding = "UTF-8"): HTMLDocument;
   public static function createFromFile(string $path, int $options = 0, ?string $override_encoding = null): HTMLDocument;
   public static function createFromString(string $source, int $options = 0, ?string $override_encoding = null): HTMLDocument;
  }
}
 
class DOMDocument extends DOM\Document {
  /* Keep methods, properties, and constructor the same as they are now */
}

4. When PHP 8.4 Will Be Released

If all goes well according to the PHP 8.4 plan created by the PHP Core developers, PHP 8.4 will be released on November 21, 2024.