Ignoring data when using SimpleXML to list children - php

Question

I'm using Simple XML to format election results data into a user-friendly webpage. I'm listing the races and candidates using PHP foreach, but there's some extra data (7 elements, to be exact) nested under each race that's being treated as candidates. How can I filter them out?
Here's the XML: https://ftpcontent.worldnow.com/wicu/BTI/election.xml
Here's the code output: https://lillydigitalmedia.com/election.php
Here's the code:
<?php
$btiresults = simplexml_load_file("https://ftpcontent.worldnow.com/wicu/BTI/election.xml");
echo "<p><em>Updated: " . $btiresults['Time'] . "</em></p>";
foreach($btiresults->children() as $race) {
echo "<h4 class='card-title' style='margin-top: 20px'><strong>" . $race->Name1 . "</strong></h4>";
foreach($race->children() as $candidate) {
echo "<p style='width: 100%;'><span style='float: left;'><strong>" . $candidate->Name . "</strong> <small>" . $candidate->Party . "</small></span><span style='float: right;'>" . $candidate->Votes . " votes</span></p>";
echo "<div class='progress' style='height: 25px; width: 100%;'>";
echo "<div class='progress-bar' role='progressbar' style='width:" . $candidate->PercentageOfVotesCast . "%' aria-valuenow='" . $candidate->PercentageOfVotesCast . "' aria-valuemin='0' aria-valuemax='100'>" . $candidate->PercentageOfVotesCast . "%</div>";
echo "</div>";
}
}
?>
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Since you are dealing with xml, you might as well use xpath.
Try something like the following (after the existing echo "<p><em>Updated: " . $btiresults['Time'] . "</em></p>";):
$races = $btiresults->xpath('//Race');
foreach($races as $race) {
echo "<h4 class='card-title' style='margin-top: 20px'><strong>" . $race->Name1 . "</strong></h4>";
foreach($race->xpath('./Candidate') as $candidate) {
echo "<p style='width: 100%;'><span style='float: left;'><strong>" . $candidate->Name . "</strong> <small>" . $candidate->Party . "</small></span><span style='float: right;'>" . $candidate->Votes . " votes</span></p>";
echo "<div class='progress' style='height: 25px; width: 100%;'>";
echo "<div class='progress-bar' role='progressbar' style='width:" . $candidate->PercentageOfVotesCast . "%' aria-valuenow='" . $candidate->PercentageOfVotesCast . "' aria-valuemin='0' aria-valuemax='100'>" . $candidate->PercentageOfVotesCast . "%</div>";
echo "</div>";
}
}
and see if it works.

Answer 2

You could simply look at the tag name of the Element, using SimpleXMLElement::getName.
Wrap the content of your inner foreach loop into an if condition that checks if it is Candidate:
foreach($race->children() as $candidate) {
if($candidate->getName() == 'Candidate') {
echo '…';
}
}
(Might perhaps make sense to rename the variable from $candiate to something like $child, since at the time it gets assigned a value in the foreach loop, you don’t know whether its actually a Candidate node yet … but that is a rather philosophical aspect.)