Question

I am debugging my code to inspect the current object.

It is a SimpleXml load from xml that looks like this

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><epreuves><epreuve id="467" noteSur="20"><![CDATA[Civil Engineering China 2012]]></epreuve></epreuves>

I am using this code to load the object.

$result=simplexml_load_string($xml_string,null,LIBXML_NOCDATA);

And when I debug my code i see this:

When I convert the object to string, it gives me the data I want, but why do I not see “Civil Engineering China 2012” somewhere in the object’s guts?

Answer 1

In short, @Gordon is quite right: SimpleXMLElement class has some very unusual properties, so it’s not sensible expecting its objects to be as revealing in the debugger as “normal” ones.

Let’s analyze it a bit more, though. Simple search through lxr.php.net (I took PHP 5.3 branch, as frankly speaking I don’t expect this to be different in 5.4) eventually leads us to the following structure:

typedef struct {
    zend_object zo;
    php_libxml_node_ptr *node;
    php_libxml_ref_obj *document;
    HashTable *properties;
    xmlXPathContextPtr xpath;
    struct {
        xmlChar               *name;
        xmlChar               *nsprefix;
        int                   isprefix;
        SXE_ITER              type;
        zval                  *data;
    } iter;
    zval *tmp;
    zend_function *fptr_count;
} php_sxe_object;

There are several notable things here – what matters in the context of question, I suppose, is that “normal” object itself (like defined here) is only a part of this structure.