Question

in the application simplexml has been converting an rss feed to an object and the elements have been extremely easy to reference. are prefixed elements (eg <this:that> )referenced the same way as a non prefixed element($item->this) in the object.

I have found no information in the manual on php.net.

Answer 1

Not quite. When you do a print_r() or var_dump() of an object representing namespaced XML you’ll notice all the namespaced nodes are missing. There are a few ways to get namespaced nodes. One way is using registerXPathNamespace() in conjunction with xpath():

$xml = simplexml_load_file('some/namespaced/xml/file.xml');
$xml->registerXPathNamespace('prefix', 'http://Namespace/Uri/Here');
$xml->xpath('//prefix:node'); //get all <prefix:node> XML nodes.

Another way is to use children() to get child nodes:

$xml = simplexml_load_file('some/namespaced/xml/file.xml');
$xml->children('prefix', true); //get all nodes with the 'prefix' prefix that are direct descendants of the root node.
$xml->someNode->children('blah', true); //get all nodes with the 'blah' prefix that are direct descendants of <someNode>