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I am working this afternoon on a top secret project that involves a system to manage pages and pages of HTML content. I won’t go into anymore details, but I do need to work deeply with HTML documents. Anyway, PHPQuery is a cool idea, but after implementing it, I noticed I was getting some odd characters where they were not supposed to be. So, another solution had to be found.

I turned to the Document Object Model (DOM) class built into PHP, which I had not yet used. The documentation sucks, but it is actually a really powerful class. It is, however, lacking one vital function. The ability to get and set the HTML/XML contents of an individual node, that is, the equivalent of the innerHTML property of JavaScript DOM.

I googled for a solution but came up empty. So, I had to invent the solution myself, and after quite some time of tinkering around here’s what I’ve got:

function innerHTML(&$dom, &$node, $html = false) {

     ## if html parameter not specified, return the current contents of $node
     if($html === false) {

          $doc = new DOMDocument();
          foreach ($node->childNodes as $child)
          $doc->appendChild($doc->importNode($child, true));

           return $doc->saveHTML();

      } else {

           ## get rid of all current children
           foreach ($node->childNodes as $child)
               $node->removeChild($child);

          ## if html is empty, we are done.
          if($html == '') return;

          ## load up $html as DOM fragment, append it to our now-empty $node
          $f = $dom->createDocumentFragment();
          $f->appendXML($html);
          $node->appendChild( $f );
     }

}

Not sure if this is the most efficient solution, but from what I’ve seen so far, it works.