News
	Latest
	Archive
	Community news

Articles
	C++
	Communities and Content
	Databases
	Editorials
	Emacs
	General
	HTML
	Java
	Notices
	PHP
	XML

Links
	Apache
	C++
	Database
	General
	HTML
	Java
	Javascript
	Linux
	Object oriented programming
	Open source
	Perl
	PHP
	Python
	Ruby
	SOAP
	XML
	Suggest a link

About
	Advertise on zez
	Contribute
	Contact us
	About zez

Parsing XML using PHP

Author: Bård Farstad

Publishing date: 11.01.2002 09:24

Traverse the document tree

In this example we have a XML file which consists of a document with a specific version. The document contains persons with the attributes firstname, lastname and description. The code snippet finds the document version and prints it. It's pretty straight forward you just check all the top nodes of the document and look for the one named document.

foreach ( $tree->children as $document )
{
    // parse the document
    if ( $document->name == "document" )
    {
        // get the document version attribute
        foreach ( $document->attributes as $documentAttr )
        {
            if ( $documentAttr->name == "version" )
            {
                print( "Found document with version: " . $documentAttr->content . "<br>" );
            }
        }

        // find persons here
    }
}

When you've found the document node you can start looking for persons. This is done in the same manner, check the children nodes and look for person.

To make the process of getting the attribute values simpler we write a helper function to fetch the attribute value from a node.

function getAttrValue( $node, $attrName )
{
    $ret = false;
     
    foreach ( $node->attributes as $nodeAttr )
    {
        if ( $nodeAttr->name == $attrName )
        {
            $ret = $nodeAttr->content;
        }
    }
    return $ret;
}

Now we're ready to parse the information describing the persons in this example. When we've found the person node we check all the subnodes and look for the nodes we want and fetch the information from these nodes.

// parse all persons
foreach ( $document->children as $person )
{
    if ( $person->name == "person" )
    {
        print( "Found a new person <br>" );

        $firstName = "";
        $lastName = "";
        $descriptionName = "";
                
        // get the name and description
        foreach ( $person->children as $personAttribute )
        {
            switch ( $personAttribute->name )
            {
                case "firstname" :
                {
                    $firstName = getAttrValue( $personAttribute, "value" );
                }break;

                case "lastname" :
                {
                    $lastName = getAttrValue( $personAttribute, "value" );
                }break;

                case "description" :
                {
                    // get the description text
                    foreach ( $personAttribute->children as $description )
                    {
                        if ( $description->type == 3 )
                        {
                            $description = $description->content;
                        }
                    }
                }break;
            }                    
        }

        print( "The persons firstname is: $firstName <br>" );
        print( "The persons lastname is: $lastName <br>" );
        print( "The persons description is: $description <br>" );
    }            
}

<< Previous page | 1 | < 2 > | 3 | Next page >> | Printer-friendly page |

Comment List

Topic:	Author:	Time:
parsing cdata	Daniel Williams	26.08.2002 17:12
How do you access the cdata within the <description> tags?