Question

I’m currently working a project that has me working with XML a lot. I have to take an XML response and decrypt each text node and then do various tasks with the data. The problem I’m having is taking the response and processing each text node. Originally I was using the XMLToArray library, and that worked fine I would change the XML into an array and then loop through the array and decrypt the values. However some of the XML response I’m dealing with have repeated tags and the XMLToArray library will only return the last values.

Is there a good way that I can take an XML response and process all the text nodes and easily putting the values into an array that has a similar structure to the response?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I would use SimpleXML.

Here’s a small example of using it. It loads and parses XML from http://www.w3schools.com/xml/plant_catalog.xml and then outputs values of “COMMON” and “PRICE” tags of each “PLANT” tag.

$xml = simplexml_load_file('http://www.w3schools.com/xml/plant_catalog.xml');
foreach ( $xml->PLANT as $plantNode ) {
    echo $plantNode->COMMON, ' - ', $plantNode->PRICE, "\n";
}

If you have any problems with adapting it to your needs, just give an example of your XML so that we can help with it.