Question

Ok so lets say i have an xml what looks like this example,

   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

   <stats id="865" name="blaah">
       <example name="blaahblaah">
           <example1>
               <x ppoints="500"/>
           </example1>
           <example2>
               <x ppoints ="150"/>
               <x points ="500"/>
               <x ppoints ="140"/>
               <x points="200"/>
           </example2>
       </example>
   </stats>

what i am trying to do here is to get all the ppoints and round them into one number and all the points and round them into one number,
like so

Stats: “rounded up ppoints” pp & “rounded up points” p

help anyone? many thanks

Answer 1

In this case, as I understand the structure of the document can contain multiple ‘example’ nodes, I think the best approach is to load the XML document and use a XPath expression to get all the nodes with a ppoints attribute and a points attribute.

Using XPath there are two possible solutions. One using SimpleXMLElement::xpath to retrieve all the required nodes and sum them manually. And another one using DOMXPath::evaluate which allows to evaluate any type of XPath expression and sum the values just using XPath. The latter solutions is simpler.

DOMXPath::evaluate

<?php

$doc = new DOMDocument;
$doc->load('file.xml');
$xpath = new DOMXPath($doc);

$sum_ppoints = $xpath->evaluate('sum(//x/@ppoints)');
$sum_points = $xpath->evaluate('sum(//x/@points)');

print "Ppoints: $sum_ppoints; Points: $sum_points\n";

?>

SimpleXMLElement::xpath

<?php

// Load XML file
$file = "file.xml";
$content = file_get_contents($file);
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($content);

// Compute sum ppoints
$sum_ppoints = 0;
$nodes = $xml->xpath('//x[@ppoints]');
foreach ($nodes as $node) {
    $sum_ppoints += $node->attributes()->ppoints;
}

// Compute sum points
$sum_points = 0;
$nodes = $xml->xpath('//x[@points]');
foreach ($nodes as $node) {
    $sum_points += $node->attributes()->points;
}

print "Ppoints: $sum_ppoints; Points: $sum_points\n";

?>