QueryPath: It's like PHP jQuery in Drupal!

QueryPath
It’s like PHP jQuery for Drupal

http://querypath.org
http://api.querypath.org

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Matt Butcher
Maintainer of QueryPath

Author of 6 books

Drupal developer at
ConsumerSearch.Com “Learning Drupal 7” will be
out in RAW this month
http://packtpub.com

Emily Brand
Just completed a
GSoC QueryPath project.
MA in Computer Science

IT Developer/Engineer
HP


What Is QueryPath?


A PHP library for working with
HTML, XML, and
Web services.


Follows the jQuery interface
as much as possible.


Why do we need it?


The Task
Find all
<a></a>
tags who have
the ancestor
<div></div>


The DOM API
• At least seventeen
classes, each with dozens
of methods.

• Complex data structure.

• Checkered history in
PHP.

• VERY powerful.


SimpleXML

• One class, about a dozen
functions and methods.

• Turns XML into basic
objects.

• Makes easy stuff easy,
and makes everything
else insanely hard.
Same size as DOM
Example


SAX / Expat
Same size,
fewer features

• Event based.

• Write your own parser
handler.

• One per XML format.

• Only reliable “legacy”
library.


QueryPath
• Compact library.

• Functions are short and
mnemonic.
[This space intentionally left blank ]
• The power of DOM, but
simpler than SimpleXML

• (Shhh... don’t tell, but it’s
built on the DOM.)


Lots of Features,
One function.


Files, strings, objects...

• Open XML/HTML ﬁle: qp(‘someﬁle.xml’);
• Parse string: qp(‘<html>...</html>’);
• Get URL: qp(‘http://drupal.org');
• Use DOM or SimpleXML object: qp($ele);


Search with CSS
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<rss xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
version="2.0" xml:base="http://technosophos.com">
<channel>
<title>TechnoSophos</title>
<link>http://technosophos.com</link>
<item>
<title>
qp($rss_url, ‘item > title’);
Drupal Dojo: "QueryPath"
</title>
<link>http://technosophos.com/content/...</link>
<description>
On August 17th at 12pm EDT (9AM PDT)...
</description>
</item>
</channel>
</rss>


Chaining (Fluent API)


$qp = new QueryPath(‘my.xml’);
$qp->ﬁnd(‘root’);
$qp->append(‘<p>Hi.</p>’)


qp(‘my.xml’, ‘root’)->append(‘<p>Hi.</p>’);


Some Things it Does
• Import/Scrape HTML • Work with RDFa

• Read XML ﬁles • Run SPARQL queries on
Semantic Web
• Remote web services
• Generate XML
• SVG image manipulation
• Transform using XSLT
• RSS or Atom feeds
• Interact with RDBMS
• Retrieve database data
into XML/HTML • And more...


QueryPath and Drupal


Myth
“QueryPath is for Drupal”

QueryPath is a PHP library, and
will work with any PHP tool.*


Fact
The QueryPath Drupal modules
provides all you need.

You can easily use QueryPath
within Drupal.

http://drupal.org/project/querypath

What’s Been Done
with QueryPath?


Honestly, I can’t keep track anymore.
But here are a few examples.


QueryPath 2.1


Six lines of
code to grab
headlines from
d.o

Better HTML
Use
htmlqp()
to parse HTML.


jQuery 1.4 Features
• attach & detach

• has

• even & odd

• ﬁrst & last

• ﬁrstChild & lastChild

• nextUntil, prevUntil &
parentsUntil

• More...


Tons of new documentation and examples.


New Logo

Designed by Michael Mesker


And the Drupal
module...


Drupal 7 version is DONE!


Demos


• Stable: QueryPath 2.0.1
http://querypath.org

• Development: QueryPath 2.1
http://github.com/technosophos/querypath

• Drupal modules at
http://drupal.org/project/querypath


QueryPath: It's like PHP jQuery in Drupal!

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