Question

I’m using SimpleXML to parse an XML API.

The API returns several child elements like this:

 ...
 <Rank0>Something</Rank0>
 <Rank1>Something</Rank1>
 <Rank2>Something</Rank2>
 ...

When to access <Rank1>, for example, I can do the following:

$response->Result->Rank1;

However, I need to loop through these values dynamically. In pseudocode, something like this:

foreach($response->Result>Rank*){
    echo "looping through rank" . $number;
    echo "value is" . $value;
}

How do I do this?

Thanks for any help in advance.

Answer 1

Use SimpleXMLElement::children():

foreach($response->Result->children() as $child_node)
{
    // do something with $child_node
}

If you need to verify that the node name is in the form of “Name” + number, you can add a condition inside your loop like the following:

if(preg_match('/^Rank\d+$/', $child_node->getName()))
{

}