Question

I have a merged xml with a root element and multiple item child elements.
Something like this

 <root>
  <item>test1</item>
  <item>test2</item>
 </root>

What I want is an easy way to parse the xml and create an array of xml strings from the items.

$arrXml[0] = '<item>test1</item>';
$arrXml[1] = '<item>test2</item>';

I’m looking for an elegant solution not any solution.

Answer 1

Ok, like already mentioned in the comments to your question I am not convinced this is really what you should be doing, but since I cant stand SimpleXml and dont want people to think it’s the only way, here is how to do it

with DOM:

$arrXml = array();
$dom    = new DOMDocument;
$dom->loadXML( $xml );
foreach( $dom->getElementsByTagName( 'item' ) as $item ) {
    $arrXml[] = $dom->saveXML( $item );
}
print_r( $arrXml );

---

with XMLReader:

$arrXml = array();
$reader = new XmlReader;
$reader->xml( $xml );
while( $reader->read() ) {
    if( $reader->localName === 'item' && $reader->nodeType === 1 ) {
        $arrXml[] = $reader->readOuterXml();
    }
}
print_r( $arrXml );

---

and XMLParser*:

xml_parse_into_struct(xml_parser_create(), $xml, $nodes);
$xmlArr = array();
foreach($nodes as $node) {
    if($node['tag'] === 'ITEM') {
        $arrXml[] = "<item>{$node['value']}</item>";
    }
}
print_r($arrXml);

^{* this can also be done via callbacks triggered when an ITEM element is encountered. Would take more code, but is pretty flexible.}

Note that all of the above might need some tweaking depending on your real XML.

---

Given that the XML in your question (which is likely only an example) is dirt simple and well defined, you can also use explode():

$arrXml = array_map( 'trim',
    array_filter(
        explode( PHP_EOL, $xml ),
        function( $line ) { return substr( $line, 0, 6 ) === '<item>'; }
));
print_r( $arrXml );

or a Regex (read disclaimer below)

preg_match_all('#<item>.*</item>#', $xml, $arrXml);
print_r($arrXml[0]);

Disclaimer Now, just to make sure you are not starting to parse XML with Regex or Explode on a regular basis: The last two approaches are only feasible if your markup is really that clearly defined as you show it.