Question

phpQuery is a really nice tool which has helped me tremendously in the past parse well-formed XHTML and XML documents, but I have recently run into a problem trying to select elements that have colons in their tagname, such as the following:

<isc:thumb><![CDATA[http://example.com/foo_thumb.jpg]]></isc:thumb>

I’ve tried to use the pq() function to select all of these elements:

foreach ( pq("isc:thumb") as $thumbnail ) {
  print pq( $thumbnail )->text();
}

Unfortunately this is doing nothing. If I try another element, like a tagname of id, the results pop up as expected.

Answer 1

You are trying to find a thumb element which belongs to the isc namespace (see XML namespace); not a tag named isc:thumb.

phpQuery can happily query for namespaced elements, just not like you are trying to do. Instead, simply provide the tag in the form namespace|tagname (i.e. isc|thumb). It is also worth noting that the namespace will have to be registered with phpQuery’s XPath handler (which is just a DOMXPath object) for it to be able to recognise the namespace.

Here’s a quick example with a sample XML document (obviously, use your own XML and be sure to provide the correct namespace URI).

phpQuery::newDocumentXML('<root xmlns:isc="urn.example.isc">
  <isc:thumb><![CDATA[http://example.com/foo_thumb.jpg]]></isc:thumb>
  <isc:thumb><![CDATA[http://example.com/bar_thumb.jpg]]></isc:thumb>
</root>
');
phpQuery::getDocument()->xpath->registerNamespace('isc', 'urn.example.isc');
foreach ( pq("isc|thumb") as $thumbnail ) {
    echo pq( $thumbnail )->text() . PHP_EOL;
}

Which outputs:

http://example.com/foo_thumb.jpg
http://example.com/bar_thumb.jpg