Parsing a SOAP response - php

Question

I have been spending hours trying to parse a SOAP response that I have no control over. I have tried numerous methods I found on SO with no luck.
Here is the response body I get from edge browser:
<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
<SOAP-ENV:Envelope xmlns:SOAP-ENV="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
<SOAP-ENV:Body>
<ns1:gXMLQueryResponse xmlns:ns1="urn:com-photomask-feconnect-IFeConnect" SOAP-ENV:encodingStyle="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/">
<return xsi:type="xsd:string"><?xml version = &apos;1.0&apos; encoding = &apos;UTF-8&apos;?>
<ROWSET>
<ROW num="1">
<CUSTOMER_NAME>HITACHI</CUSTOMER_NAME>
</ROW>
</ROWSET>
</return>
</ns1:gXMLQueryResponse>
</SOAP-ENV:Body>
</SOAP-ENV:Envelope>
I'm trying to get the CUSTOMER_NAME value.
Here is the code I am using:
$client = new SoapClient($urla, array('trace' => 1));
try {
$result = $client->__soapCall("gXMLQuery", $params);
$response = ($client->__getLastResponse());
$xml = simplexml_load_string($response);
$rows = $xml->children('SOAP-ENV', true)->Body->children('ns1', true)->gXMLQueryResponse->return->ROWSET->ROW;
foreach ($rows as $row)
{
$customer = $row->CUSTOMER_NAME;
echo $customer;
}
} catch (SoapFault $e) {
}

Answer 1

return is a string, you need to parse it first before you can access it using SimpleXML.
First you need to decode the string using html_entity_decode, after that you can load the decoded string with simplexml_load_string:
$return = $xml->children('SOAP-ENV', true)->Body->children('ns1', true)->gXMLQueryResponse->return;
$decodedReturn = html_entity_decode($return, ENT_QUOTES | ENT_XML1, 'UTF-8');
$rowset = simplexml_load_string($decodedReturn);
echo $rowset->ROW->CUSTOMER_NAME;