HTML table to php array

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So i am going with the DOM approach. Here is what I have so far:

      $contents = file_get_contents('internatdata.htm');
    //create a DOM based off of the string from the html table
     $DOM = new DOMDocument;
   $DOM->loadHTML($contents);
   //get all tr and td
   $items = $DOM->getElementsByTagName('tr');
   $tds = $DOM->getElementsByTagName('td');
   function tdrows($elements){
       $str = "";
       for ($ii =0; $ii < $elements->length; $ii++){
            $str .= $elements->item($ii)->nodeValue . ",";
           }
          return $str;
       }
   for ($i = 0; $i < $items->length; $i++){
       echo tdrows($tds) . "; 
";
       }
    }
?>

The issue I am having is that I only want to select the td's from each table row. I am trying to achieve this with a nested loop. unfortunately It is printing the text of every tag on the page how ever many times as there are tags. how can i get it so its only printing the td of each tr and not every td on the dom?

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I need to use an html table as the source of my data because I don't have access to the database. I figure to be able to query data from the html table I need create a function to convert the table into an array, or a multidimensional array.

I have the basic Idea I think but I need some help finishing the code to return an array based off the html table.

Also If you have a better way of doing this other than converting the table to an array then please let me know

Here is the idea I had so far:

  function getdata(){
    $contents = file_get_contents('data.htm');
    //add delimiters (semicolon for a row and comma for a cell) ???
    $stripped = strip_tags($contents);
    //explode into an array based off the delimiters above ???
    }
    ?>