Question

Please teach me how to navigate an xml with php.

Have a look at http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/XML/C-42.xml.

I made my first attempts to use simplexml_load_file, but what it does is group all the data by tags, which is great at the lower level, but what I need is to preserve some linearity.

In other words, once I get inside , I need to know which Section follows which Heading, etc.

How would I go about that?

<?php
    $url="http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/XML/C-42.xml";
    $xml=simplexml_load_file($url);

    echo $xml->Identification->LongTitle;
    echo "<br>";

    foreach ($xml->Body as $hd) {
           // WHAT DO I DO HERE?
    }
?>

Answer 1

You can loop over all children of an element in SimpleXML using the ->children() method.

foreach ( $simple_xml_doc->children() as $tag ) { ... } will give you a SimpleXML object for each child element, regardless of tag, in the order they appear in the original file.