Question

As per discussion How to check if a string can be used as a variable name in PHP? the user TIM is giving there a good answer but still not solving my problem.

I am doing the call exactly like that, but on production server they have magic quotes gpc active! and.. of course.. i can’t disable it, i can’t ask to disable and last but not least, i can’t disable it during runtime (as per manual).
So in this case, even if using

echo $xml->example->{'phone-number-1'};

php is trying to execute a mathematical operation between that stuff and i am really becoming mad to understand how to access to that “node” in this case.

And of course, if i test this with magic quotes OFF, everything is ok as per manual.

Thank you in advance

Answer 1

To elaborate on the comment made, with the information available that you want to share, your code works as advertised, regardless of whether magic_quotes_gpc is set or not. It will not attempt to perform any arithmetic on the strings, and magic_quotes_gpc will not affect the way simplexml parses it’s data.

~/temp  ►  cat foo.xml
<example>
    <node-ex>
       <identifier-1>ValueOfIdentifier1</identifier-1>
       <phone-number-1>141 555 1414</phone-number-1>
    </node-ex>
</example>

~/temp  ►  cat test.php
<?php
$root = simplexml_load_file("foo.xml");

echo $root->{'node-ex'}->{'identifier-1'} . "\n";
echo $root->{'node-ex'}->{'phone-number-1'} . "\n";

~/temp  ►  php test.php              
ValueOfIdentifier1
141 555 1414
~/temp  ►  php -dmagic_quotes_gpc=1 test.php
ValueOfIdentifier1
141 555 1414

Of course, if your example isn’t the same as the data you’re actually using, that might be the issue. If magic_quotes_gpc is enabled, using stripslashes() should reverse it, and then it should work. If you’re not using a constant string, but a variable — that might be the cause of the issue. There is however nothing in your example that indicates anything that should be affected by either magic_quotes_gpc or using “-” in the property name.