Question

I’m using SimpleXML to get some data from an API. Its returning things in this format:

object(SimpleXMLElement)#10 (1) {
  [0]=>
  string(36) "xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"
}

My question is, how can I possibly access the string value of this object? If I try to do $myVariable->0 that gives me an error. Doing $zero = '0' and then echo $myVariable->$zero doesn’t work either, nor does (array) $myVariable work (that gives a warning).

Answer 1

The trick is that SimpleXMLElement has __toString magic method implemented that would return your string(36) "xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx", so to get this string you just cast (string) on your SimpleXMLElement object:

(string)$myVariable

With PHP you can

print $myVariable;

of course, so explicit (string) here is not necessarily needed.