Using Xpath to get Data from XML with Namespace

Question

I've been banging my head against a brick wall with this so would really appreciate some help. I'm using xpath for the first time and have it doing most of the things I need without any problems.

Here is an example snippet:

 $urlw = "http://www.wahanda.com/rss/mobdeal.xml";
 $wf = gzopen ($urlw, 'r');
 $wxml = new SimpleXMLElement (fread ($wf, 1000000));

 foreach($wxml->xpath ('/rss/channel/item') as $entry) 
 {
    $price = $entry->price;
    echo $price . "<br/>"; 
 }

My problem is that the feed I'm currently using has namespace declarations so the "price" node is in fact "w:price". Some of the nodes I want to use are prefixed with "w:" while others aren't. My code is therefore failing to pick up the contents of the prefixed nodes. Can someone please tell me how I work around this? From reading around I've added the following:

 $wxml->registerXPathNamespace('w', 'http://www.wahanda.com/ns/1.0');

but still not sure what I need to do from here on.

Thanks a lot in advance for your help.

once you registered the prefix, you can query nodes with that prefix, e.g. w:foo/w:bar with the xpath() method. Please clarify the problem. — Gordon
– Gordon, Commented Jun 13, 2011 at 9:03
Hi @Gordon - I'm trying to work out what I need to replace $price = $entry->price; with in my code above to give me the individual w:price values for each "item" in the XML. I used $price = $wxml->xpath ('//w:price') per the suggestion below but this returns an array - given there's only one "w:price" node in each "item" I thought it would work... — Chris
– Chris, Commented Jun 13, 2011 at 9:28
in that case, you have to use children(). See PHP SimpleXML Namespace Problem for a similar question. — Gordon
– Gordon, Commented Jun 13, 2011 at 9:30
@Gordon - excellent thank you. I've now used $price = $entry->children('w', true)->price; and that has done the trick! — Chris
– Chris, Commented Jun 13, 2011 at 10:03

datasage · Accepted Answer · 2011-06-13 09:04:29Z

0

You are on the right track. All you need to do is write an xpath query with the namespace. Something like:

$wxml->xpath ('//w:price')

answered Jun 13, 2011 at 9:04

datasage

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1 Comment

Chris Over a year ago

Thanks @datasage. When I replace $price = $entry->price; with $price = $wxml->xpath ('//w:price'); in the code above, the output I get is "Array". There is however only one "w:price" node in each "item" so I thought it should be picking out an individual price each time, not an array?

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