Question

I cannot seem to parse out the metrics for an organic keyword. I am using simplexml_load_string to load the whole response string and then when I print_r the object I can see this:

[0] => SimpleXMLElement Object
                (
                    [id] => http://www.google.com/analytics/feeds/data?ids=ga:480&ga:keyword=cats&start-date=2011-04-10&end-date=2011-07-24
                    [updated] => 2011-07-23T17:00:00.001-07:00
                    [title] => ga:keyword=cats
                    [link] => SimpleXMLElement Object
                        (
                            [@attributes] => Array
                                (
                                    [rel] => alternate
                                    [type] => text/html
                                    [href] => http://www.google.com/analytics
                                )

                        )

                )

But when I look at the actual (pre-formatted) response I see some extra data that didn’t survive the format:

<entry gd:etag="W/&quot;hdSFEs.&quot;" gd:kind="analytics#datarow"> 
<id>http://www.google.com/analytics/feeds/data?ids=ga:430&amp;ga:keyword=cats&amp;start-date=2011-04-10&amp;end-date=2011-07-24</id> 
<updated>2011-07-23T17:00:00.001-07:00</updated> 
<title>ga:keyword=cats</title> 
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.google.com/analytics"/> 
<dxp:dimension name="ga:keyword" value="cats"/> 
<dxp:metric confidenceInterval="0.0" name="ga:organicSearches" type="integer" value="2"/> 
</entry> 

I need that metric value at the bottom, in this case it’s two. How can I get it?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Edit: the easy way out is this:

var_dump($object->xpath('dxp:metric'));

The problem is that simplexml has a ‘gotcha’ with namespaces. As kudo’s to squirrel, you indeed need to use namespaces, but I have a hunch that you only posted a part of the xml response and not the whole response.

There is an excellent post about it here: http://blogs.sitepoint.com/simplexml-and-namespaces/

In order to fetch the value of the metric (and the metric itself), you can get started with this piece of code.

var_dump($object->children('http://schemas.google.com/analytics/2009'));

Be aware that there are some attributes in there that are again in a different namespace.

The rest also has been answered here: Parse XML with Namespace using SimpleXML