FluentDOM 5

FluentDOM 5.0.0 is now released.

Up to version 4.1, FluentDOM was an implementation of the jQuery Traversing and Manipulation APIs in PHP. Version 5 is a complete rewrite and adds a secondary focus. FluentDOM now provides extended variants of PHPs DOM classes, too. This allows workarounds for bugs, syntax sugar and shortcuts.

Bugs

#39521

The second argument to DOMDocument::createElement() it breaks if it contains an entity. FluentDOM avoids that by creating and appending a text node. Additionally it adds a third argument to provide attributes.

#55700

By default PHP registers the namespace definitions of the current context. This uses the namespace prefixes as identifiers, but they are not. They are allowed to change (even on different elements in the same document). You should always register your own prefixes so you do not depend on the prefixes in the document - they are just not relevant. So the automatic registration costs performance without a real gain in the best case. In the worst case it overrides a your namespace registration and you can not fetch the data you want.

FluentDOM adds a property to change this behavior. The automatic namespace registration is disabled by default and can be activated using the property or the third argument for evaluate()/query().

Syntax Sugar

Cast To String

Most of the nodes can be cast to string. for example the following will return the whole text content of an document.

echo $dom->documentElement;

Iterator For Child Nodes

FluentDOM\Element is iterate-able. Using foreach() on it will iterate over the child nodes. The Iterator is a RecursiveIterator, too.

ArrayAccess

FluentDOM\Element allows array syntax. A numeric key like $element[1] will access the child node. An qualified name string like $element['href'] will access the attribute.

Namespaces

FluentDOM\Document allows to register namespaces on the document. If methods like setAttribute() or createElement() recognize a colon in the tag name, they will resolve the namespace prefix an call their namespace aware variant.

Shortcuts

FluentDOM\Document::createElement() allows to provided content and attributes. FluentDOM\Element::appendElement() allows to create and append an element with a single call.

Other methods of the FluentDOM\Element class are variants of the document variants using the element node as default context. 

Backwards Compatbility

FluentDOM 5 is mostly backwards compatible. The FluentDOM() function still exists and the returned FluentDOM\Query instance has the same jQuery like API. Only the loaders where changed.

CSS Selectors

The FluentDOM\Query class allows to set an callback function that is used to convert the provided selectors to xpath expressions. FluentDOM::QueryCss() returns a FluentDOM\Query instance that supports CSS selectors. You will need to have Carica PhpCss or Symfony CSS-Selector installed in you project.