Get only the body of an HTML email in PHP

Question

So I have a PHP script which takes in piped emails, appends a footer to them and passes them on.

But if someone sends an email which is already in HTML format it just inserts the entire html email into the body of a new html document. I need a script which will (if the email is already in HTML) take off the html, head and body tags leaving the original email.

I.e. if someone sent an email

<html><body>This is my awesome input email which is <strong>already</strong> in HTML</body></html>

It is parsed by my script to become

<html><body><html><body>This is my awesome input email which is <strong>already</strong> in HTML</body></html></body></html>

How can I get it to take off the HTML structure if it exists?

alex · Accepted Answer · 2011-09-19 01:04:51Z

I don't think it's possible to detect if the html element is present when working with DOMDocument and HTML because loadHTML() will add its own html element if it is not present.

The code below will just always return the serialised HTML of the body element.

$dom = new DOMDocument; $dom->loadHTML($html); $body = ''; foreach($dom->getElementsByTagName('body')->item(0)->childNodes as $child) { $body .= $dom->saveHTML($child); }

CodePad.

Alternatively, you could treat the HTML as XML and then detect it, but without a documentElement you may have problems. I solved that by adding a dummy documentElement, though it's a bit clunky (I'd probably stick to the above code myself).

// Need a documentElement so wrap it with some generic garbage. $html = '<garbage>' . $html . '</garbage>'; $dom = new DOMDocument; $dom->loadXML($html); if ($dom->getElementsByTagName('html')->length) { ... }

CodePad.

I ran that and got Warning: DOMDocument::saveHTML() expects exactly 0 parameters, 1 given in #### : eval()'d code on line 12
@MitchellGrice: Are you using an older version of PHP? If so, replace saveHTML($child) with saveXML($child, LIBXML_NOEMPTYTAG).
I'm using 5.2.16 The change in your comment works perfectly, thanks for your help

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