Question

Given this XML:

<?php
$xml = <<<XML
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
    <root>
        <project type="residential">
            <item>
                <description><![CDATA[Node 1 text]]></description>
            </item>
            <item>
                <description><![CDATA[Node 2 text]]></description>
            </item>
        </project>
    </root>
XML;
?> 

I would like to list the content of all of the of the fields.

This is what I have. It fails with an error “member function xpath() on a non-object”.

// load xml file
include 'xml/portfolio_xml.php';
$portfolio = simplexml_load_string($xml);

foreach ($portfolio->xpath('//project[@type="residential"]/item') as $item) {
    echo $item->description;
}

UPDATE

Actually, this example does work. Obviously pulling the sample out of the context of the rest of my application was what I needed.

Answer 1

You need to check that simple_xml_load_string succeeded. Its failing right now because $portfolio isnt an object.

This is partially why i prefer using the real constructor instead of the function. I prefer to catch exceptions and handle errors that way:

try
{
  $portfolio = new SimpleXmlElement($xml);

  foreach ($portfolio->xpath('//project[@type="residential"]/item') as $item) {
    echo $item->description;
  }
}
catch(Exception $e)
{
  // do something.. or nothing on an error
}

This way not only can you handle the error but you can take specific action based on the Exception type, code, message, or all of the above.

Additionally, depending on the type of errors you may want to keep them internal to libxml.