XML Parsing in PHP (using simplexml_load_string) - php

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

Answer 1

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];

Answer 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/"><Packet><Errors /><SessionToken>3msk323msd-3312-CQ-2</SessionToken></Packet></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"
}