DomCrawler filterXpath for emails - symfony

Question

In my project I am trying to use filterXPath for emails. So I get an E-Mail via IMAP and put the mail body into my DomCrawler.
$crawler = new Crawler();
$crawler->addHtmlContent($mail->textHtml); //mail html content utf8
Now to my issue. I only want the plain text of the mail body, but still remain all new lines spaces etc - the exact same as the mail looks just in plain text without html (still with \n\r etc).
For that reason I tried using $crawler->filterXPath('//body/descendant-or-self::*/text()') to get every text node inside the mail.
However my test-mail containts html like:
<p>
<u>
<span>
<a href="mailto:mail#example.com">
<span style="color:#0563C1">mail#example.com</span>
</a>
</span>
</u>
<span>
</span>
<span>·</span>
<span>
<b>
<a href="http://www.example.com">
<span style="color:#0563C1">www.example.com</span>
</a>
</b>
<p/>
</span>
</p>
In my mail this looks like mail#example.com · www.example.com (in one single line).
With my filterXPath I get multiple nodes which result in following (multiple lines):
mail#example.com
· wwww.example.com
I know that probably the 
 might be the problem, which is a \r, but since I can't change the html in the mail, I need another solution - as mentioned before in the mail it is only a single line.
Please keep in mind, that my solution has to work for every mail - I do not know how the mail html looks like - it can change every time. So I need a generic solution.
I already tried using strip_tags too - this does not change the result at all.
My current approach:
$crawler = new Crawler();
$crawler->addHtmlContent($mail->textHtml);
$text = "";
foreach ($crawler->filterXPath('//body/descendant-or-self::*/text()') as $element) {
$part = trim($element->textContent);
if($part) {
$text .= "|".$part."|\n"; //to see whitespaces etc
}
}
echo $text;
//OUTPUT
|mail#example.com|
|·|
| |
|www.example.com|
| |

Answer 1

I believe something like this should work:
$xpath = new DOMXpath($crawler);
$result = $xpath->query('(//span[not(descendant::*)])');
$text = "";
foreach ($result as $element) {
$part = trim($element->textContent);
if($part) {
$text .= "|".$part."|"; //to see whitespaces etc
}
}
echo $text;
Output:
|mail#example.com||·||www.example.com|

Answer 2

Do note that you are dealing with two different ways to treat whitespace only text nodes: HTML has its own rules about if those are rendered (the difference are mainly between block elements and inline elements and also includes normalization) and XPATH works over a document tree provided by a parser (or DOM API) which has its own configuration about preserving or not those whitespace only text nodes. Taking this into account, one solution could be to use the string() function to get the string value of the element containing the email:
For this input:
<root>
<p>
<u>
<span>
<a href="mailto:mail#example.com">
<span style="color:#0563C1">mail#example.com</span>
</a>
</span>
</u>
<span>
</span>
<span>·</span>
<span>
<b>
<a href="http://www.example.com">
<span style="color:#0563C1">www.example.com</span>
</a>
</b>
<p/>
</span>
</p>
</root>
This XPath expresion:
string(/root)
Outputs:
mail#example.com
·
www.example.com
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