XML Parsing in PHP (using simplexml_load_string)

Question

I have the following code and I have been working to try to get this working.

<?php declare(strict_types=1);

$session_token = '?'; $xml = '';
$result = '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<string xmlns="http://ws.careerbuilder.com/resumes/">&lt;Packet&gt;&lt;Errors /&gt;&lt;SessionToken&gt;3msk323msd-3312-CQ-2&lt;/SessionToken&gt;&lt;/Packet&gt;</string>
';

if ($result) {

    $xml = simplexml_load_string($result);
    print_r($xml);

    if ($xml !== false) {
        $session_token = $xml->SessionToken;
        echo PHP_EOL.'Session: '. $session_token;

    } else {
        echo 'Error: XML does NOT appear to be valid';
    }

} else
    echo 'Error: result does NOT appear be valid';

The problem is no matter what I'm not able to extract the <SessionToken> value from the XML. When I use print_r() I get the following:

SimpleXMLElement Object
(
    [0] => <Packet><Errors /><SessionToken>3msk323msd-3312-CQ-2</SessionToken></Packet>
)

Alex Howansky · Accepted Answer · 2020-12-30 19:55:44Z

2

Your input is entity-encoded. If this is really what it looks like, you'll need to decode it first:

$xml = simplexml_load_string(html_entity_decode($result));
$token = (string) $xml->Packet->SessionToken[0];

answered Dec 30, 2020 at 19:55

Alex Howansky

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1 Comment

ThW Over a year ago

Sorry - this solution is wrong. You're merging the inner document (in the value) with its container using string operations.

ThW · Accepted Answer · 2020-12-30 20:52:48Z

2

You document contains nested XML. The text content of the string element is serialized XML. So you need to parse it after reading it.

$result = '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<string xmlns="http://ws.careerbuilder.com/resumes/">&lt;Packet&gt;&lt;Errors /&gt;&lt;SessionToken&gt;3msk323msd-3312-CQ-2&lt;/SessionToken&gt;&lt;/Packet&gt;</string>
';

$string = new SimpleXMLElement($result);
$packet = new SimpleXMLElement((string)$string);
var_dump($packet);

Output:

object(SimpleXMLElement)#2 (2) {
  ["Errors"]=>
  object(SimpleXMLElement)#3 (0) {
  }
  ["SessionToken"]=>
  string(20) "3msk323msd-3312-CQ-2"
}

answered Dec 30, 2020 at 20:52

ThW

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