PHP Xpath : get all href values that contain needle

Not sure I understand the question correctly, but the second XPath expression already does what you are describing. It does not match against the text node of the A element, but the href attribute:

$html = <<< HTML<ul>    <li>        <a href="http://example.com/page?foo=bar">Description</a>    </li>    <li>        <a href="http://example.com/page?lang=de">Description</a>    </li></ul>HTML;$xml  = simplexml_load_string($html);$list = $xml->xpath("//a[contains(@href,'foo')]");

Outputs:

array(1) {  [0]=>  object(SimpleXMLElement)#2 (2) {    ["@attributes"]=>    array(1) {      ["href"]=>      string(31) "http://example.com/page?foo=bar"    }    [0]=>    string(11) "Description"  }}

As you can see, the returned NodeList contains only the A element with href containing foo (which I understand is what you are looking for). It contans the entire element, because the XPath translates to Fetch all A elements with href attribute containing foo. You would then access the attribute with

echo $list[0]['href'] // gives "http://example.com/page?foo=bar"

If you only want to return the attribute itself, you'd have to do

//a[contains(@href,'foo')]/@href

Note that in SimpleXml, this would return a SimpleXml element though:

array(1) {  [0]=>  object(SimpleXMLElement)#3 (1) {    ["@attributes"]=>    array(1) {      ["href"]=>      string(31) "http://example.com/page?foo=bar"    }  }}

but you can output the URL now by

echo $list[0] // gives "http://example.com/page?foo=bar"