Question

I have this XML:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<data>
    <header>
        <export_time>2012-08-28 08:13:36</export_time>
        <file_name>nameasd</file_name>
    </header>
    <shipping>
            <shipping_number>some data</shipping_number>
            <location_id>some data</location_id>
            <status>DONE</status>
                <shipping_line>
                    <article id="1257" />
                    <article id="1177" >
                        <product>5500070000126273</product>
                        <product>5500070000126264</product>
                        <product>5500070000126255</product>
                        <product>5500070000126246</product>
                        <product>5500070000126237</product>
                    </article>
                </shipping_line>
    </shipping>
</data>

Ii can access data like this:

$shipping_number_array = $xml->xpath('/data/shipping/shipping_number');
$location_id_array = $xml->xpath('/data/shipping/location_id');
$shipping_status_array = $xml->xpath('/data/shipping/status');
$shipping_number = $shipping_number_array[0];
$location_id = $location_id_array[0];
$status = $shipping_status_array[0];

Now I would like to check if the article element has any children and if yes then put them in an array.

This doesn’t seem to work, I get error : call to a member function hasChildren() on a non-object.

            if ($article_array->hasChildren()) {
                error_log('has children');
            }

Answer 1

You can use xpath’s child:: location path to select the article node childs and back up one for the article node like this:

$article_array = $xml->xpath('//article/child::*/..');

This should only return the article nodes that has childs (with id 1177 in your example).