What is a Simple HTML DOM?

What is DOM in HTML?

A Document Object Model (DOM) represents the structure of a webpage in a tree-like format. This structure allows developers to access and manipulate the content, structure, and style of a website programmatically.

Key Differences Between HTML and DOM

• HTML (HyperText Markup Language): The static markup language used to structure web pages. In web scraping, HTML provides the raw data, but accessing it directly can be cumbersome without a structured approach.

• DOM (Document Object Model): A dynamic representation of the HTML structure that browsers and parsers use to interact with web content programmatically. For web scraping, the DOM is crucial because it allows you to navigate the content as a tree, making it easier to locate and extract specific elements like product prices, article titles, or links.

Using the DOM in web scraping enables more precise extraction, especially when dealing with complex or nested HTML structures. Tools like Simple HTML DOM harness the DOM to simplify element selection and data retrieval.

What is SIMPLE HTML DOM?

The Simple HTML DOM is a PHP library that simplifies the process of parsing HTML. It enables developers to scrape data from websites easily by providing a jQuery-like syntax to traverse and manipulate the DOM.

Installing Simple HTML DOM

There are two ways to install Simple HTML DOM for PHP - the first is via Composer, and the second is to install it manually. 

Using Composer (Recommended)

1. Ensure you have Composer installed.
2. Run the following command in your project directory:

composer require simplehtmldom/simplehtmldom

Manual Installation

1. Download the library from the Simple HTML DOM GitHub repository.
2. Include it in your PHP project:

require 'simple_html_dom.php';

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