Question

when loading an xml document and converting to an array using

json_decode(json_encode(simplexml_load_string($xml)), 1);

All empty xml nodes (<node />) are converted to array() I would like them to be an empty string instead. Do I need to go through all elements and replace each empty node with something else?

I am loading the xml document with $xml = new SimpleXmlElement($this->feed_uri, LIBXML_NOBLANKS | LIBXML_NOEMPTYTAG , true);

Answer 1

You can not accomplish that automatically. So you would need to replace empty arrays with empty strings after the conversion.

By the way, LIBXML_NOEMPTYTAG makes no sense here:

This option is currently just available in the DOMDocument::save and DOMDocument::saveXML functions.
https://www.php.net/manual/en/libxml.constants.php