Question

I have a PHP script that pulls an XML file from a remote server, and converts it to JSON using simplexml_load_string and json_encode. However, the simplexml_load_string seems to ignore inline attributes, like so:

<AxisFeedrate dataItemId="iid7" timestamp="2012-03-21T15:15:41-04:00" sequence="7" name="Yfrt" subType="ACTUAL" units="MILLIMETER/SECOND">UNAVAILABLE</AxisFeedrate>

In this case the JSON representation would be {AxisFeedrate: ‘UNAVAILABLE’}

However, I need to have those attributes available. One idea I’ve been approaching is replacing strings to turn the attributes into text nodes like so:

<AxisFeedrate>
  <dataItemId>iid7</dataItemId>
  <timestamp>2012-03-21T15:15:41-04:00</timestamp>
  <sequence>7</sequence>
  <name>Yfrt</name>
  <subType>ACTUAL</subType>
  <units>MILLIMETER/SECOND"</units>
  <value>UNAVAILABLE</value>
</AxisFeedrate>

I can turn the attributes into their own tag elements with regular find/replace, but I’m having trouble wrapping the original text value in a Value tag, at least with find/replace.

What are some good approaches for doing this? The above chunk of XML is in the middle of many similar chunks on different data items, so I couldn’t just start by replacing the first closing > with >…

Answer 1

You could use SimpleXML itself to read the attributes.

Example:

<?php
$xml=simplexml_load_string('<AxisFeedrate dataItemId="iid7" timestamp="2012-03-21T15:15:41-04:00" sequence="7" name="Yfrt" subType="ACTUAL" units="MILLIMETER/SECOND">UNAVAILABLE</AxisFeedrate>');

foreach($xml->attributes() as $k=>$v) {
    echo $k." -> ".(string)$v."\n";

}
?>

---

Output:

dataItemId -> iid7
timestamp -> 2012-03-21T15:15:41-04:00
sequence -> 7
name -> Yfrt
subType -> ACTUAL
units -> MILLIMETER/SECOND