Question

Pretty straightforward — Is there any way to access the data of a processing instruction node using SimpleXML? I understand that SimpleXML is, well, simple; as a result it has a number of limitations, predominantly working with mixed content nodes.

An example:

Test.xml

<test>
    <node>
        <?php /* processing instructions */ ?>
    </node>
</test>

Parse.php

$test = simplexml_load_file('Test.xml');
var_dump($test->node->php); // dumps as a SimpleXMLElement, so it's sorta found,
                            // however string casting and explicitly calling
                            // __toString() yields an empty string

So is this simply a technical limitation imposed by the simplicity of SimpleXML, or is there a way? I’ll transition to SAX or DOM if necessary, but the SimpleXML would be nice.

Answer 1

The problem is that < ? php ? > is considered a tag… so it gets parsed into a single big tag element. You’d need to do:

$xml = file_get_contents('myxmlfile.xml');
$xml = str_replace('<?php', '<![CDATA[ <?php', $xml);
$xml = str_replace('?>', '?> ]]>', $xml);
$xml = simplexml_load_string($xml, "SimpleXMLElement", LIBXML_NOCDATA);

I’m not entirely sure this would work, but i think it will. Test it out…