How to make modifications only to certain elements of an HTML string on the server-side?

Question

Is there a similar way to select / perform DOM manipulation on the server-side (PHP) like the way jQuery works?

For example, if I wanted to modify content of each <pre class="raw">...</pre> elements inside of a post content, in jQuery you can easily capture them all with:

//In jQuery, this will obtain a collection of <PRE> elements with class "raw":
$("pre.raw").each( function(index,tag) {
    //Modify content of each PRE tags here...
    tag.innerHTML = tag.innerHTML.replace( ..., ... );
});

In PHP however, I'm trying to do this by adding a filter to "the_content", which will then do some string replacements only inside each of those <pre class="raw"> elements.

Does WordPress already have some built-in utility method to grab elements this way? Or does some 3rd party PHP script exists that will do this?

Answer 1

You may also take a look at phpQuery.

Answer 2

Answering to myself (and perhaps some other developers curious about this question), there is a PHP server-side script that can manipulate the DOM just like jQuery can:

http://simplehtmldom.sourceforge.net/index.htm

Althought the syntax isn't exactly the same (doesn't use the dollar $ sign as the jQuery object), the functionality works basically the same.

Example (taken from the above link):

$html = file_get_html('http://www.google.com/');

// Find all images 
foreach($html->find('img') as $element) 
       echo $element->src . '<br>';

// Find all links 
foreach($html->find('a') as $element) 
       echo $element->href . '<br>';