Question

Ok guys I’m using xml to store page information for a dynamic website. I need to figure out a way to take a variable(file name) and pull the related node and parse that information. so basically here’s my XML structure…

<SITE>

<PAGE>
<FILENAME>sub.php</FILENAME>
<DESCRIPTION>this is an example sub page</DESCRIPTION>
<TITLE>NOH Sub page</TITLE>
<PARENTS>
 <PARENT>What is NOH</PARENT>
</PARENTS>
</PAGE>

<PAGE>
<FILENAME>about.php</FILENAME>
<DESCRIPTION>description description description </DESCRIPTION>
<TITLE>About Us</TITLE>
<PARENTS>
 <PARENT>Company</PARENT>
 <PARENT>People</PARENT>
</PARENTS>
</PAGE>

</SITE>

Is there a way to use SimpleXML and PHP to take a variable say.. ‘sub.php’ and say I want the node where filename = ‘sub.php’, and then be able to parse that node(page) for needed info. Thanks!

Update, where I’m confused is…
i have this function

function getPage($pagePath){

$file = "includes/sitestructure.xml";
$xml = simplexml_load_file($file);  
return print_r($xml-xpath(PAGE/FILENAME));  
}

but my xpath doesn’t work, and I’m not sure how to logically get the info I need.. I know how to normally parse XML with PHP but not how to specify a specific node by comparing it to a variable then parse it.

Answer 1

$xml-xpath(PAGE/FILENAME)

This is broken in several ways, but this is an XPath question not a PHP syntax one.

---

You want to get the PAGE element(s) which contain a FILENAME of your chosen file name. To do that in XPath, a predicate can be used.

PAGE[FILENAME="sub.php"]

In your PHP code that might look like

$pages = $xml->xpath('PAGE[FILENAME="sub.php"]');
$first_page = $pages[0];
echo $first_page->TITLE; // NOH Sub page

The important point here is the use of the predicate to filter the result to only the page element(s) that you want.

• http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath/#predicates