DomCrawler Component ==================== DomCrawler eases DOM navigation for HTML and XML documents. If you are familiar with jQuery, DomCrawler is a PHP equivalent: use Symfony\Component\DomCrawler\Crawler; $crawler = new Crawler(); $crawler->addContent('

Hello World!

'); print $crawler->filterXPath('descendant-or-self::body/p')->text(); If you are also using the CssSelector component, you can use CSS Selectors instead of XPath expressions: use Symfony\Component\DomCrawler\Crawler; $crawler = new Crawler(); $crawler->addContent('

Hello World!

'); print $crawler->filter('body > p')->text(); Resources --------- Unit tests: https://github.com/symfony/symfony/tree/master/tests/Symfony/Tests/Component/DomCrawler