PHP XML Reader - Put Values into Array

Question

In a previous question I asked how to extract values from a XML file and put them into an array.

PHP xmlreader - values to array question

When using simpleXML, I was unable to read the XML file without errors being returned. I can only assume the XML file contains some bad characters because the file was successfully read with PHP XMLreader with the encoding set to ISO-8859-1.

Ideally I'd like to use simpleXML because looping seems simpler, but XMLreader seems to work.

Is there a way to set encoding of an XML file for simpleXML?

2. If using XMLreader, how can you revise the code from my previous question add values to array only when a particular value in an element is found?

Example: Current code from previous question grabs all id and username.
How do you get id and username only when [ title ] = value

<!-- XML File -->
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<working version="2.0">
<group name="test">
    <userdata>
        <title>data</title>
        <id>data</id>
        <username>data</username>
            </userdata>
     </group>
</working>

Kevin Peno · Accepted Answer · 2011-05-06 15:31:18Z

3

There is no way to use anything other than UTF-8 with SimpleXML. However, since SimpleXML is just an easier way to use DOM, you could switch to using DOM instead. In fact, what you want would be pretty simple in DOM. Change '%%something%%' to what you want to match (e.g., 'administrator').

<?php
    $xml = new DOMDocument( "1.0", "ISO-8859-1" );
    $xml->load("path/to/file.xml");

    $xpath = new DOMXPath( $xml );
    $nodes = $xpath->query( "/working/group/userdata[ title = '%%something%%' ]" );

    $array = array();
    foreach( $nodes as $k => $node )
    {
        foreach( $node->childNodes as $cnode )
        {
            $array[ $k ][ $cnode->nodeName ] = $cnode->textContent;
        }
    }
?>

Please note: Both DOM and SimpleXML load the entire document into memory before they are able to process against it. Because of this, if your document is large than the available memory to PHP (see ini setting of memory_limit), you will need to use XMLReader or XMLWriter in these extreme cases.

Also note, I didn't test this but it should be pretty damn close to what you need. And if you also want an XMLReader example of this, let me know. It was just faster to use DOM for me :P

edited May 6, 2011 at 15:31

answered May 6, 2011 at 15:17

Kevin Peno

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2 Comments

rrrfusco Over a year ago

An XMLReader example would be interesting. Someone suggested using xml_set_object. I really have no idea how that would work in the case of extracting specific elements with the parser/reader. Thanks for the DomXPath example.

Kevin Peno Over a year ago

@rrfusco: My XMLReader::foo is a bit rusty. However, given your previous answer, my immediate guess would be that you need read the xml as you currently are doing, but store the data into a temp array. Then, after you have the current userdata, you check that $tmp['title'] === 'administrator' and, if it does, save that data into the primary data array. Does that make sense?

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