Question

It’s my xml file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> 
<documentElement>
    <rows>
        <row>
            <column>1</column>
            <column>David</column>
            <column>Johnson</column>
        </row>
        <row>
            <column>2</column>
            <column>Jack</column>
            <column>Nixon</column>
        </row>
    </rows>
</documentElement>

I want to loop over rows and add them to an array. I passed it to simplexml and then loop through these objects, but couldn’t do it:

$xml->rows
$xml->rows->row
$xml->row
$xml->column

What should I do?

Thanks.

Answer 1

This is actually one of the more basic examples:

$sxml = simplexml_load_string($xml);

foreach($sxml->rows->row as $name => $row)
{
    echo $name, ': ', var_dump($row);
}

Which will give you the following output:

row: object(SimpleXMLElement)#3 (1) {
  ["column"]=>
  array(3) {
    [0]=>
    string(1) "1"
    [1]=>
    string(5) "David"
    [2]=>
    string(7) "Johnson"
  }
}
row: object(SimpleXMLElement)#5 (1) {
  ["column"]=>
  array(3) {
    [0]=>
    string(1) "2"
    [1]=>
    string(4) "Jack"
    [2]=>
    string(5) "Nixon"
  }

You can find an online-demo here: http://codepad.org/CYyQhvnM

You should actually take a look at the simple exmamples section in the manual, it has some very insightful examples that are explained more in depth than mine here:

• Basic SimpleXML usage

I hope the answer is helpful anyway. Related questions are:

• How to use foreach with PHP & XML (simplexml)