Question

I’m having some difficulties getting PHP to read my XML document. I’m trying to echo the content from each node based on whatever catid I’ve selected.

XML: text.xml

<root>
  <category catid='1'>
    <text id='TXT1'><![CDATA[ Lorem Ipsum ]]></text>
    <text id='TXT2'><![CDATA[ Lorem Ipsum ]]></text>
    <text id='TXT3'><![CDATA[ Lorem Ipsum ]]></text>
  </category>
  <category catid='2'>
    <text id='TXT1'><![CDATA[ Lorem Ipsum ]]></text>
    <text id='TXT2'><![CDATA[ Lorem Ipsum ]]></text>
    <text id='TXT3'><![CDATA[ Lorem Ipsum ]]></text>
  </category>
</root>

PHP:

<?php  
$xml = simplexml_load_file('/path/to/text.xml');
$category = $xml->xpath("//category[@catid='1']/text");
$ids = ['TXT1', 'TXT2', 'TXT3'];

foreach($ids as $id){
  echo $category[$id]; //I'm not quite sure how to do this bit.
}
?>

Any help is appreciated, thanks!

Answer 1

Here comes an example how to do it using the DOM extension together with XPATH:

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

$selector = new DOMXPath($doc);

$result = $selector->query("//category[@catid='1']");
if($result->length !== 1) {
    die('BAD xml');
}

$category = $result->item(0);
$ids = array('TXT1', 'TXT2', 'TXT3');

foreach($ids as $id){
    // note $category as the second argument. meaning that the query
    // is relative to the category node and not to the root node
    $textResult = $selector->query("text[@id='$id']", $category);
    if($textResult->length < 1) {
        die('BAD xml');
    }

    $text = $textResult->item(0)->nodeValue;
    echo $text, PHP_EOL;
}