PHP parse XML within XML

Question

I have an XML file that contains XML within it. How would I go about parsing everything into an array or object?

<DATA>
    <ROW>
        <id>1</id>
        <message_id>123456789</message_id>
        <brand_name>SAMPLE</brand_name>
        <request_xml>
&lt;?xml version=&quot;1.0&quot; encoding=&quot;UTF-8&quot;?&gt;
&lt;Email&gt;
&lt;Service&gt;
&lt;LogMessage/&gt;
&lt;Delivery&gt;
&lt;Synchronous/&gt;
&lt;/Delivery&gt;
&lt;/Service&gt;
&lt;Model&gt;
&lt;Head&gt;
&lt;From&gt;[email protected] &lt;/From&gt;
&lt;To&gt;[email protected]&lt;/To&gt;
&lt;Subject&gt;Your Question&lt;/Subject&gt;
&lt;/Head&gt;
&lt;ns2:ContactUs&gt;
&lt;ns2:Sender&gt;
&lt;ns2:FirstName&gt;John&lt;/ns2:FirstName&gt;
&lt;/ns2:Sender&gt;
&lt;/ns2:ContactUs&gt;
&lt;/Model&gt;
&lt;InlineImages/&gt;
&lt;History/&gt;
&lt;/Email&gt;
        </request_xml>
        <http_status>400</http_status>
        <created_by>admin</created_by>
        <created_on>2014-09-08 01:56:59</created_on>
    </ROW>
</DATA>

My goal is to end up with somthing like that:

SimpleXMLElement Object
(
    [ROW] => SimpleXMLElement Object
        (
            [id] => 1
            [message_id] => 123456789
            [brand_name] => SAMPLE
            [request_xml] => SimpleXMLElement Object
                (
                    ...
                    [LogMessage] => 
                    ...
                    [from] => [email protected]
                    ...
                )

            [http_status] => 400
            [created_by] => admin
            [created_on] => 2014-09-08 01:56:59
        )
)

I didn't put all levels of the request_xml in my example, but you get the idea. Basically I want that request_xml to be parsed like the rest of the XML file.

How could I achieve this? Thanks in advance for any help on this!

Why not just parse main string in SimpleXML, extract substring, parse that as SimpleXML and add sub XML as node to main XML? — ToBe
– ToBe, Commented Sep 10, 2014 at 9:43
You could either use html_entity_decode or str_replace with a specific set of entities. — ToBe
– ToBe, Commented Sep 10, 2014 at 9:49
To deal with the encoding, I ended up using simplexml_load_string($xmlfile, 'SimpleXMLElement', LIBXML_NOENT); so I didn't need to use html_entity_decode. — MrUpsidown
– MrUpsidown, Commented Sep 10, 2014 at 13:39

ThW · Accepted Answer · 2014-09-10 12:24:55Z

2

If you read the node value of request_xml element node, the result will have the entities decoded.

$outer = new DOMDocument();
$outer->loadXml($xml);
$xpath = new DOMXpath($outer);

$innerXml = $xpath->evaluate('string(/DATA/ROW/request_xml)');
echo $innerXml;

Output:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Email>
<Service>
<LogMessage/>
...

You can load the inner xml into a separate document object.

$inner = new DOMDocument();
$inner->loadXml(trim($innerXml));
echo $inner->saveXml();

But in your example the inner XML is broken. It is missing the namespace definition for the ns2 prefix. If added it will work:

Demo: https://eval.in/191279

answered Sep 10, 2014 at 12:24

ThW

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2 Comments

MrUpsidown Over a year ago

Thanks for your answer. I have omitted the namespace definition in my question but it actually is there. But for some reason, simplexml_load_string() fails to parse these ns2 tags. But that is not a big issue. What I really care is the content of the fields, so I can do a quick str_replace on the tags before parsing.

ThW Over a year ago

SimpleXMLs namespace handling is a little complex, you can register your own prefixes using SimpleXMLElement::registerXpathNamespace() and use them with xpath(), some of the methods are namespace aware, too. But it is only valid for a that element, on a child element your have to register them again. DOM uses a separate object for Xpath so you have to register them only once. stackoverflow.com/a/25571382/2265374

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