Question

I’m using SimpleXML to parse a rss feed and if an attribute in returned arrays by SimpleXML matches with my string show data. but some items are duplicated in XML file and I want to use just their first occurrence. but I’m getting all the duplicated results.

foreach($feed->city as $city){
    if(in_array($city['Name'], $cities)){
        echo $city['Name'].'<br />';
    }
}

where $feed->city is my XML data and $cities is my array.

Answer 1

I would use php’s Xpath library to do this. Xpath 2.0 could do this directly, but the built in Xpath 1.0 language still gets you very close.

    <!-- language: lang-php -->
$xmlDocument = new DOMDocument();
    if ($xmlDocument->load('file.xml')) {
    $xpath = new DOMXPath($xmlDocument);
    $nodeList = $xpath->query('//city/@Name', $xmlDocument);

from here you have a DOMNodeList class. throw it in an array and remove duplicates. I don’t ahve a php environment around right now to finish it up, but I wanted to offer a different direction than just simplXML by itself.