Question

I’m having trouble accessing the child nodes of my SimpleXML content. I’ve tried a few variations like $xmlData->id or $xmlData['id'].

I’m somewhat new to this area, so any help would be greatly appreciated.

Code sample:

    $xmlData = simplexml_load_string($string);
    $person = $xmlData->documentElement;
    $id = $xmlData->id;

Var dump of $xmlData from Simple XML:

object(SimpleXMLElement)#23 (10) { 
     ["id"]=> string(10) "yTZn1JIaaa" 
     ["first-name"]=> string(6) "First Name" 
     ["last-name"]=> string(6) "Last Name"...

Answer 1

I tried to rebuild your snippet:

<?php
$string = "<person><id>1</id><firstname>Foo</firstname><lastname>Bar</lastname></person>";
$xmlData = simplexml_load_string($string);
echo $xmlData->id . " - " . $xmlData->firstname . " - " . $xmlData->lastname;
?>

This worked fine for me – the Output was:

1 - Foo - Bar

You can see, that my firstname and lastname tagnames are different to yours – the dash sometimes causes troubles. If you need the dash, do it this way instead:

echo $xmlData->id . " - " . $xmlData->{'first-name'} . " - " . $xmlData->{'last-name'};

Anyways, the id worked fine…so maybe you have another error that prevents your scripts from running properly? Maybe it would be helpful if you could post your XML-String.

Cheers,
Max

P.S.: Why are you executing this line?

$person = $xmlData->documentElement;