Question

I don’t usually have to do any backend stuff, but for this one project I have to parse XML using PHP so it’s all kind of new and very complicated to me. I need to display the fourth tag on a page and I figured I would use getElementsByTagName but the trouble is the three previous tags are the same, so it looks something like this:

<Person fname="John" lname="Smith"/> 
<Person fname="Frank" lname="Jones"/> 
<Person fname="Mike" lname="Jackson"/> 
<Person fname="Jack" lname="Williams"/> 
<value no="50"/> 
<value no="60"/> 
<value no="70"/> 

Here is what I would like to output in my HTML page using the first attribute in the fourth tag and the attribute in the second tag:

Mike: 60

Basically, is there any way I can request the value of the attribute in the fourth tag regardless of what the tag is or what comes before or after it?

Any help would be appreciated — thanks!

Edit – I didn’t write the XML, I request from a remote server.

Answer 1

My notes about XML:

Links:
http://php.net/simplexml.examples-basic

And example:

$xml='<p4wappremium>
    <servermessage>
        <providerref sid="123"/>
        <useractioninfo
            msisdn="48790300200"
            tid="12123123"
            stid="123123"
            pid="345345"
            bid="1"
          />
    </servermessage>
</p4wappremium>';

$xml = simplexml_load_string($xml);

foreach ($xml->providerref[0]->attributes() as $name -> $value) {
    ${$name}=$value;
}

foreach ($xml->useractioninfo[0]->attributes() as $name -> $value) {
    ${$name}=$value;
}

Hope it will be useful for your case.