Question

I’m trying to search for data in a XML File using php.
I’m not trying to get values of certain elements, I would use xpath if I wanted that.

This is an example of my XML file:

<root>
<author>foo</author>
<date>bar</date>
</root>

Let’s say my client wants to search for the words ‘fab’.
I want all strings with the character ‘f’ and ‘b’ and ‘a’ to return.
So output would be:

Foo
bar

The author name could be James Westside for example.

<author>James Westside</author>

And the user searched for jam
it would return James Westside

I hope my question is clear.

Answer 1

You should use PHP:s XMLReader class. XMLReader acts as a cursor going forward on the document stream and stopping at each node on the way.

Something like this:

$search_phrase = 'fab';

$xml = new XMLReader;
$xml->open('your-xml-file.xml');

while ($xml->read()) {
  $node = $xml->expand();

  /* Looping through all elements in the XML */

  /* Test if the current node is a text node: */
  if ($node->nodeType == XMLReader::TEXT) {

    /* Loop all letters in search_phrase */
    for ($i = 0; $i < strlen($search_phrase); $i++) {

      /* Test if the text in the text node is matching any letter i search_phrase: */
      if (strpos($node->nodeValue, substr($search_phrase, $i, 1)) !== false) {
        echo($node->nodeValue . "\n");
        break;
      }
    }
  }
}