Question

I have a XML file. Here is a small version of that.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xml:lang="fr">
<title>Liste des ebooks</title>
<updated>2012-03-01T01:23:24Z</updated>
<author>
<name>Drown Del</name>
</author>
<opensearch:totalResults>2338</opensearch:totalResults>
<opensearch:itemsPerPage>100</opensearch:itemsPerPage>
<entry>
<category term="Romans" label="Romans"/>
<category term="Aventures" label="Aventures"/>
</entry>
</feed>

First I would like to know how do we call something like opensearch:totalResults in XML terms.

And I need your help with obtaining following values with PHP.

<opensearch:totalResults>2338</opensearch:totalResults> I need to get 2338 to a PHP variable.

Thank you.

---

Thank you all for your answers.

I could fix it with following way.

$xml = simplexml_load_string($xmltext);
$val = $xml->xpath('opensearch:totalResults');
echo $val[0];

Answer 1

For your first question, opensearch:totalResults is the qualified name of a start tag. It is called a qualified name (you might come across this as QName) because it contains the namespace (opensearch) for the tag.

For your second question, you can easily parse your XML into a DOMDocument and then query it for the value of the relevant tag. There are lots of examples on SO and of course on Google; a basic one from PHP.net is here.

Important note: Your current XML document does not contain an XML namespace declaration for the opensearch namespace, and will not parse as a result. You need to add such a declaration by making a modification:

<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xml:lang="fr"
      xmlns:opensearch="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/">

If you need more powerful querying you can also use XPath. A minimal example would look like:

$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->loadXML($xml);

$xpath = new DOMXPath($doc);

$nodes = $xpath->query('//opensearch:totalResults');
foreach ($nodes as $node) {
    echo $node->nodeValue;
}