Question

hi guys so i have a problem with an xml, it has – before node and i dont know how to deal with this properly with xpath, so the xml would look like this

<xml>
 <item>
 -<description>
  -<type>
   </type>
  </description>
 </item>
</xml>

so how can i navigate down to say type in xpath just before anyone wastes any time giving out the wrong answer i have tried the normal method of $xml->item->description->type this does not work in this case i dont know as its not an illegal character in the name how to deal with the – before th nodes

Answer 1

I don’t think it’s a waste of time to point out that /xml/item/description/type does in fact work (in XPath 1.0 and 2.0 in XmlSpy).

That said, I think that perhaps you don’t really want those ‘-‘ characters in your xml. Perhaps a better question would be “How do I strip extraneous ‘-‘ characters from xml?”

Edit:

Here’s some PHP adapted from the SimpleXMLElement documentation to show you that I’m not lying:

<?php
    $string =
    "<xml>
     <item>
     -<description>
      -<type>
          Hello World!
       </type>
      </description>
     </item>
    </xml>";

    $xml = new SimpleXMLElement($string);

    $path = '/xml/item/description/type';

    $result = $xml->xpath('/xml/item/description/type');

    while(list( , $node) = each($result)) {
        echo '$path: ',$node,"\n";
    }
?>

Outputs:

/xml/item/description/type:
    Hello World!

If you want any further help, please provide a short example that reproduces the issue.

(Apologies if my PHP is bad, I’m a bit rusty)