Question

<Node name="node1">
  <x x="x"/>
  <x x="xxx"/>
</Node>

<Node name="node2">
  <x x="xx"/>
  <x x="xxxx"/>
</Node>

Okay, this is an XML sample:

I call its content using simplexml_load_file

and if i wanna call a specific node content it should be :

$xml = simplexml_load_file('file.xml');
$contents = $xml->node1

and to call node object

$contents = $xml->node1->x

Seems fine till now,
the question is,
how to call object “x” without mentioning node name

you noticed the sample i added above it has 2 nodes

to call x from it i should mention nodename then x

i want to call all “x” from the whole XML

how is it possible?

Answer 1

SimpleXMLElement::xpath() will do the trick when you don’t have namespaces to worry about. If you do have namespaces… you’ll need SimpleXMLElement::registerXPathNamespace().

<?php
$xml = <<<EOT
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<root>
<Node name="node1">
  <x x="x"/>
  <x x="xxx"/>
</Node>

<Node name="node2">
  <x x="xx"/>
  <x x="xxxx"/>
</Node>
</root>
EOT;

// Original question
$s = new SimpleXMLElement($xml);
$r = $s->xpath('//Node/x');
var_dump($r);

// Something about names
$r2 = $s->xpath('Node[@name]');
$names = array();
foreach($r2 as $elem){
  $names[] = "{$elem['name']}";
}
var_dump($names);

// RoseWarad's answer (more efficient than "something about names")
$r3 = $s->xpath('*/@name');
var_dump($r3);

?>