Question

I’m using SimpleXml in PHP and it works well for me.

Recently I had a problem when trying to grab a particular node (I hope that’s the right term).

Here’s a sample XML

<xml>
    <attribute>
        <item name="fun_level">
            <value>Really Fun</value>
        </item>
    </attribute>
</xml>

So I’m using simplexml to get all the attributes, and run them through a loop, which all works fine. However, when I want to grab the “value” for an item with a particular name, I’m having trouble.

This works if I’m just trying to grab the value for the first item:

$value = (string)$attribute->item[0]->value;

Unfortunately I want to refer to a specific item, so I’m trying to do something like this, which isn’t working:

$value = (string)$attribute->item["@name='fun_level'"]->value;

I’m assuming I’m doing something wrong with my syntax where I refer to the name attribute of the item. Should I be using round brackets? braced? Do I need to do something different with the quotes?

Thanks for the help!

Answer 1

You need to use the SimpleXMLElement::xpath() method.

<?php
error_reporting(-1);
ini_set('display_errors', true);

$xml = '<xml>
    <attribute>
        <item name="fun_level">
            <value>Really Fun</value>
        </item>
    </attribute>
</xml>';

$sxe = new SimpleXMLElement($xml);

foreach($sxe->xpath('//item[@name="fun_level"]') as $item){
    echo $item->value;
}

Also, see the manual page describing SimpleXML’s basic usage for more examples.