PHP parses XML content without looping the hyperlink - php

Question

I have an xml file structured like this:
<channel>
<title>abc</title>
<link>domain.com</link>
<description>Bla bla.</description>
<item>
<title>xyz </title>
<link>domain.com/</link>
<description>
<table border="1" width="100%"><tr><th colspan="2"></th><th>P</th><th>W</th><th>D</th><th>L</th><th>GF</th><th>GA</th><th>Dif</th><th>Pts</th></tr><tr><td width="7%">1</td><td width="27%"><a target="_blank" href="domain[dot]com/new-york/"/>New York</td><td width="7%"><center>12</center></td><td width="7%"><center>8</center></td><td width="7%"><center>2</center></td><td width="7%"><center>2</center></td><td width="7%"><center>17</center></td><td width="7%"><center>10</center></td><td width="7%"<center>+7</center></td><td width="7%"><center>26</center></td></tr><tr><td width="7%">2</td><td width="27%"><a target="_blank" href="domain[dot]com/lon-don/"/>London</td><td width="7%"><center>12</center></td><td width="7%"><center>6</center></td><td width="7%"><center>4</center></td><td width="7%"><center>2</center></td><td width="7%"><center>22</center></td><td width="7%"><center>12</center></td><td width="7%"><center>+10</center></td><td width="7%"><center>22</center></td></tr></table><br/>
</description>
I used this piece of code to parse the table data in PHP and i was successful:
$url = "link to the above xml file";
$xml = simplexml_load_file($url);
foreach($xml->channel->item as $item){
$desc = html_entity_decode((string)$item->description);
$descXML = simplexml_load_string('<desc>'.$desc.'</desc>');
$html = $descXML->table->asXML();
$html .= "<hr />";
echo $html;
}
However, it also includes the hyperlink in the table data/ array values, which are domain[dot]com/newyork/ and domain[dot]com/london/ while outputting.
What I am expecting is that I would like to exclude the hyperlinks in the output, which means that I just need the plain text such as Lon Don or New York and so on.
No hyperlink in the output, please.
Thanks,

Answer 1

As you are just displaying the entire table XML in
$html = $descXML->table->asXML();
This contains all of the markup of the table, what you need to do if you just want some of the table data is to further process it to extract that data...
$xml = simplexml_load_file($url);
foreach($xml->item as $item){
$desc = html_entity_decode((string)$item->description);
$descXML = simplexml_load_string('<desc>'.$desc.'</desc>');
// Loop over each row of the table
foreach ( $descXML->table->tr as $row ) {
// If there are td elements
if ( isset($row->td) ) {
// Extract the value from the second td element, convert to a string and trim the result
$html = trim((string)($row->td[1]));
$html .= "<hr />";
echo $html;
}
}
}
If you want all of the <tr> XML except the <a> tag, you can just unset it (assuming it will always be there)...
foreach ( $descXML->table->tr as $row ) {
// If there are td elements
if ( isset($row->td) ) {
unset($row->td[1]->a);
$html = $row->asXML(). "<hr />";
echo $html;
}
}