Question

I am trying to add some data received from a form to an XML file which already exists. I am using DOMDocument in PHP for adding the data to the file…

While I am somewhat successful in adding the data, it is adding into the wrong element.

Now I know there is only gonna be one element with a certain name, which will be the root element. I also know that there is gonna be only one element with a name which will contain other data.

Those elements don’t have an ID and I want to read them by getElementsByTagName in PHP using DOMDocument.

So if i know that there is gonna be only one element with that name in the whole file, then can i do something like this:

$element = $dom->getElementByTagName('ElementName'); $element[0];

I mean can I select only the first element in the array? And how should I do it? Because the code above doesn’t work.

Answer 1

TagName refers to the name of the html or xml tag. If there is only one you should be able to do something like this:

$element = $dom->getElementByTagName('ElementName')->item(0);

However it sounds like what you are really looking for can be done with xpath:

$xpath = new DOMXPath($dom);
$elements = $xpath->query("//*[@name='ElementName']");

foreach ($elements as $node)
{
    $element[] = $node;
}

Now $element[0] should be the element you are looking for.