Question

Right, so this is my first day using XML. I’m not creating the XML, someone is sending me a URL and I need to do something with it using PHP. This is what the XML structure looks like:

<response>
<query id="1">
<results>
    <item>
        <id>GZ7w39jpqwo</id>
        <rank>1</rank>
        <explanation>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Nulla a massa lectus, sed convallis sapien. Curabitur sem mauris, ullamcorper ut. </explanation>
    </item>
    <item>
        <id>hfMNRUAwLVM</id>
        <rank>2</rank>
        <explanation>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Nulla a massa lectus, sed convallis sapien. Curabitur sem mauris, ullamcorper ut. </explanation>
    </item>
    <item>
        <id>I_cxElavpS8</id>
        <rank>3</rank>
        <explanation>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Nulla a massa lectus, sed convallis sapien. Curabitur sem mauris, ullamcorper ut. </explanation>
    </item>
</results>
</query>
</response>

So, yeah, this is what I’ve figured out so far…

$url = "http://www.MyURL.blah";

$string = file_get_contents($url);

$xml = simplexml_load_string($string);

echo $xml->getName();

This echoes the word ‘response’. Yay, go me! So now how the hell do you get the id, rank, and explanation of each item? I only posted 3 items above. There’ll actually be about 50.

Answer 1

This example may help you, it used using DOMDocument.

$document = new DOMDocument(); //Creates a new DOM Document (used to process XML)
$document->loadXML($fileContents); //Load the XML file from an string
$resultsNode = $document->getElementsByTagName("results")->item(0); //Get the node with the results tag
foreach($resultsNode->childNodes as $itemNode) //Get each child node (item) and process it
{
    foreach($itemNode->childNodes as $unknownNode) //Get each child node of item and process it
    {
        if($unknownNode->nodeName == "id") //Check if it's the dessired node
        {
            $this->id = $unknownNode->value; //Assign the value of the node to a variable
        }
        if($unknownNode->nodeName == "rank")
        {
            $this->rank = $unknownNode->value;
        }
        if($unknownNode->nodeName == "explanation")
        {
            $this->explanation = $unknownNode->value;
        }
    }
}