Question

Can anyone advise on the fastest, least resource intensive method by which I can see whether ‘Column Name=Error’ exists please?

I don’t want to parse the document, but simply check if elements exist.

Thanks in advance,

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Table>
<Columns Items="4">
<Column Name="Error" Type="String" />
<Column Name="Description" Type="String" />
<Column Name="Cause" Type="String" />
<Column Name="Resolution" Type="String" />
</Columns>
<Rows Items="1">
<Row Error="2" Description="Unknown key" Cause="Unknown key" Resolution="Please check     the key is correct, it should be the in form AA11-AA11-AA11-AA11." />
</Rows>
</Table>

Answer 1

As others have mentioned, the least resource intensive would be a simple strpos() call, though that’s subject to error if the exact format of the XML ever changes. A fullproof way is to use DOM, then you could try an xpath query …

$xml = '...'
$dom = new DomDocument();
$dom->loadXML($xml);
$xpath = new DOMXPath($dom);

// returns NULL if no columns found with name="error"
$err = $xpath->query('//Column[@Name="Error"]')->item(0);

if ($err) {
  // there is a column with attribute Name="Error"
}