Question

I have this XML

<STOREITEMS>
  <CREATED value="Tue Oct 9 5:30:01 BST 2012">
    <CATEGORY id="442" name="Hen And Stag Nights"></CATEGORY>
    <CATEGORY id="69" name="Games"></CATEGORY>
    <CATEGORY id="252" name="Love Zone"></CATEGORY>
    <CATEGORY id="202" name="Spotlight  Items"></CATEGORY>
  </CREATED>
</STOREITEMS>

I need to get the Category – name attribute with PHP

So far I have this

$xml = simplexml_load_file("http://www.dropshipping.co.uk/catalog/xml_id_multi_info.xml");

foreach($xml->CATEGORY['name']->attributes() as $category)    
{    
    echo $category; 
}

This however returns Fatal error: Call to a member function attributes() on a non-object

Any ideas?
Thank you.

Answer 1

The CATEGORY nodes are nested inside the CREATED node, so you’d need to access it there, and accessing CATEGORY['name']->attributes() makes no sense, since that would try to access non-existent attributes on the name attribute of the first CATEGORY node.

So do you want to retreive the name attribute values of all CATEGORY nodes, or all CATEGORY nodes, or maybe only those CATEGORY nodes that have a name attribute?

All CATEGORY nodes:

foreach($xml->CREATED->CATEGORY as $category)
{
    echo $category['name'] . '<br />';
}

Only the CATEGORY nodes name attributes:

foreach($xml->xpath('//CATEGORY/@name') as $name)
{
    echo $name . '<br />';
}

Only the CATEGORY nodes that have a name attribute:

foreach($xml->xpath('//CATEGORY[@name]') as $category)
{
    echo $category['name'] . '<br />';
}