Question

I’m loading an XML file in via simpleXML. I’m a novice at best at PHP and new to parsing PHP but I’m a little confused

I’m trying to understand the structure of the variable I have stored, so I tried var_dump()

The thing that’s confusing me is the data I’m looking for that’s in the XML is not anywhere in the dumped data

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos?q=surfing&max-results=25

That’s the URL I’m using at the moment. However, for example, the duration/seconds is nowhere to be found in the dumped variable data– where is it and how do I access it?

here is the output I’m getting: http://pastebin.com/ggumXTEu

Answer 1

The path to <yt:duration> is /feed/entry/media:group/yt:duration/

You don’t see these elements when using var_dump(), because they belong to a namespace(media and yt).

You may use SimpleXMLElement->children() to access these elements, you need to supply the namespace-uri as argument to children()

<ol>
<?php
$xml=simplexml_load_file('http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos?q=surfing&max-results=25');
foreach($xml->entry as $entry)
{
  $duration=$entry
              ->children('http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/')
                ->group
                  ->children('http://gdata.youtube.com/schemas/2007')
                    ->duration
                      ->attributes()
                        ->seconds;
       printf('<li><strong>%s</strong>( %ds)</li>',$entry->title,$duration); 
}
?> 
</ol>