PHP DOM textContent vs nodeValue?

I finally wanted to know the difference as well, so I dug into the source and found the answer; in most cases there will be no discernible difference, but there are a bunch of edge cases you should be aware of.

Both ->nodeValue and ->textContent are identical for the following classes (node types):

• DOMAttr
• DOMText
• DOMElement
• DOMComment
• DOMCharacterData
• DOMProcessingInstruction

The ->nodeValue property yields NULL for the following classes (node types):

• DOMDocumentFragment
• DOMDocument
• DOMNotation
• DOMEntity
• DOMEntityReference

The ->textContent property is non-existent for the following classes:

• DOMNameSpaceNode (not documented, but can be found with //namespace:* selector)

The ->nodeValue property is non-existent for the following classes:

• DOMDocumentType

See also: dom_node_node_value_read() and dom_node_text_content_read()