Question

I’ve got this block which is appears over and over again in my code with slight changes, i would like to use a function, but as far as i know when writing a function you set the number of arguments,

the block of code im using is

 $type = $xml->response->williamhill->class->type;
    $type_attrib = $type->attributes();
      echo "<h2>".$type_attrib['name']."</h2>";
      echo "<h2>".$type_attrib['url']."</h2>";

the main difference is that the first line which drills down through an xml document, it may drill down further, in other places, is that possible to do with a function ?

ie. it may need to look like this in some places :

$xml->response->williamhill->class->type->market->participant

Answer 1

You could use XPath:

function get_type_as_html($xml, $path)
{
  $type = $xml->xpath($path)[0]; // check first if node exists would be a good idea
  $type_attrib = $type->attributes();
  return "<h2>".$type_attrib['name']."</h2>" .
         "<h2>".$type_attrib['url']."</h2>";
}

Usage:

echo get_type_as_html($xml, '/response/williamhill/class/type');

Also, if any part of this path is always the same, you can move that part into the function, i.e.

$type = $xml->xpath('/response/' . $path);