XPath - array to string conversion error

Question

I'm using simplexml_load_string to load some XML:

$xml = "<payment><cardHolderName><![CDATA[John Smith]]></cardHolderName></payment>";
$xml = simplexml_load_string($xml, null, LIBXML_NOCDATA);

How can I then access the cardHolderName (John Smith) using xpath? I've tried:

$name = $xml->xpath('/payment/cardHolderName');
echo $name;

But the value is empty and I get a warning:

Array to string conversion

Same result with all of these xpaths:

'/payment/cardHolderName'
'/payment/cardHolderName[1]'
'/payment/cardHolderName/text()'
'/payment/cardHolderName[1]/text()'

Thanks in advance.

The xpath() method always returns an array with alll matched nodes. You can't use an xpath with it that returns anything else than nodes. — Fabian Schmengler
– Fabian Schmengler, Commented Feb 26, 2013 at 10:52
Just FYI: SimpleXMLElement::xpath() has no support for the xpath function text(). You can only query elements and attributes with simplexml xpath. — hakre
– hakre, Commented Mar 15, 2013 at 19:22

hakre · Accepted Answer · 2013-03-15 19:21:50Z

2

see if this works for you:

$name = $order->xpath('/payment/cardHolderName');
echo $name[0];

edited Mar 15, 2013 at 19:21

hakre

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answered Feb 26, 2013 at 10:48

Satish Gadhave

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1 Comment

Jonathan Over a year ago

It does, thank you. I should've mentioned that I'd already worked that out, but I wondered why it won't work with xpath alone.

Jon · Accepted Answer · 2013-02-26 10:51:08Z

0

The XPath query isn't quite right, in this context $xml represents your root element ("payment") so you would refer to the name with

$order->xpath('cardHolderName');

That said, AFAIK simplexml has less than stellar XPath support. You 'd be doing this much easier with DOMDocument and DOMXPath instead, which works as you 'd expect.

answered Feb 26, 2013 at 10:51

Jon

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1 Comment

Jonathan Over a year ago

Sorry, that was in fact a typo when transferring the code. I still get the same result, so I'll look into DOMDocument and DOMXpath.

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