Question

My code

<?php
        $a = 'node'
        $xml = simplexml_load_file('config.xml');
        echo $xml->node //work fine
        echo $xml->{$a};  //also work fine
        ?>

<?php
        $a = 'node[0]'
        $xml = simplexml_load_file('config.xml');
        echo $xml->node[0] //work fine
        echo $xml->{$a};  //DOESNT WORK!
        ?>

Why node[0] in a variable not work ? how can I solve?

Answer 1

node is the actual property name of the property that you want to access. When you used node[0] instead of node, it looked for the property called node[0] instead of accessing the 0th index of the array $xml->node. Basically, It looked for node[0] as if you typed $xml->{"node[0]"} instead of node (which is what you’re expecting to do), and it can’t find it. So you’d want to try something like this instead:

echo $xml->{$a}[0];