Question

I can’t seem to get anything to work with simpleXML for PHP. What is wrong with the following:

$xml = simplexml_load_string('<book><title>The Title</title></book>');
$title = $xml->book->title;
echo "<pre>title = $title\n</pre>";

The resulting output is:

title =

Why isn’t the output as follows?

title = The Title

Please advise.

Answer 1

Since <book> is the root node of this snippet, you need $xml->title rather than $xml->book->title.

$xml = simplexml_load_string('<book><title>The Title</title></book>');
$title = $xml->title;
echo "<pre>title = $title\n</pre>";

// Prints
<pre>title = The Title
</pre>

The structure is more easily discovered if you var_dump() it:

var_dump($xml);
object(SimpleXMLElement)#1 (1) {
  ["title"]=>
  string(9) "The Title"
}