How to load XML file with its comments using PHP

Question

I'm trying to load an XML file using:

$xml = simplexml_load_file('https://xxxxx/xxxxx.xml');

And XML file has some comments you can see in the pic below, which I'd like to use the data in the comments while creating my table:

But when I tried to var_dump the data I see ["comments"] as:

["comment"]=>
  array(2) {
    [0]=>
    object(SimpleXMLElement)#5 (0) {
    }
    [1]=>
    object(SimpleXMLElement)#7 (0) {
    }
  }

Question is how could I retrieve the content of comments so I can use the lang names given in them?

Why on earth would you encode useful information as comments? — Sammitch
– Sammitch, Commented Feb 8, 2019 at 23:03

cmac · Accepted Answer · 2019-02-08 22:22:14Z

1

Use file_get_contents instead:

$xml = file_get_contents('https://xxxxx/xxxxx.xml');

If you need xml to load into object then I think you have to use DOMDocument():

$dom = new DOMDocument();
$dom->load('https://xxxxx/xxxxx.xml');
$xpath = new DOMXpath($dom);
$comment = $xpath->evaluate('string(//channel/item[1]/comment())');
echo $comment;

var_dump($xml); // showing comments

edited Feb 8, 2019 at 22:22

answered Feb 8, 2019 at 22:13

cmac

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1 Comment

ucanfil Over a year ago

Thank you, I've solved it with a similar query like: /territory/languagePopulation/following::comment()[1]

Nigel Ren · Accepted Answer · 2019-02-08 22:27:59Z

You will need to use DOMDocument as SimpleXML isn't good for comments. You can use XPath to find the comment your after (use normalize-space() to remove spaces around the text) and following-sibling to return the following node. The last line just outputs the element it's found, you will need to process it as required (use [0] as query will return a list of nodes and you just want the first one).

$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->load($file);
$xp = new DOMXPath($doc);

$lang = "Finland";
$langPop = $xp->query("//comment()[normalize-space(.)='$lang']/following-sibling::*[1]");

echo $doc->saveXML($langPop[0]);

With some sample data...

<base>
    <!-- Finland -->
    <languagePopulation>Finland data
    </languagePopulation>
    <!-- England -->
    <languagePopulation>England data
    </languagePopulation>
</base>

will give

<languagePopulation>Finland data
    </languagePopulation>

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