Question

Consider the following XML:

<s:Envelope xmlns:s="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/">
   <s:Body>
      <myResponse xmlns="https://example.com/foo">
         <myResult xmlns:a="https://example.com/bar" xmlns:i="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
            <a:accountNumber>AAA</a:accountNumber>
            <a:accountName>BBB</a:accountName>
            <a:accountType>CCC</a:accountType>
         </myResult>
      </myResponse>
   </s:Body>
</s:Envelope>

I am attempting to select myResult and all the elements underneath it.

The closest I have gotten is:

//*[local-name()='myResult']//a:*

Which gets me the values of the elements, but I don’t know which which value belongs to which element.

I am doing this in PHP, here is (roughly) the code I am using:

<?php
$xmlObject = new SimpleXMLElement($result);
$namespaces = $xmlObject->getNamespaces(true);
foreach($namespaces as $key => $value) {
   if($key == '') {
      $key = 'ns';
   }
   $xmlObject->registerXPathNamespace($key, $value);
}
$element = $xmlObject->xpath("//myResult");
?>

I know there have been a bunch of questions about XPath and XML namespaces (Oh, how I’ve searched), but I haven’t found one that matches my particular case. Is what I want to do even possible?

Answer 1

Your //*[local-name()='myResult']//a:* works fine. You just need to loop through and use getName to get the tag’s name.

$element = $xmlObject->xpath("//*[local-name()='myResult']//a:*");
foreach($element as $e){
    echo $e->getName() . ': '. (string)$e;
}

Demo: http://codepad.org/BAefIKZ4

EDIT: Since you are registering the namespaces, why not use them?

$element = $xmlObject->xpath("//ns:myResult//a:*");

Demo: http://codepad.org/9MKq5oDt