PHP SimpleXML: How to access nested namespaces? - php

Question

Given this XML structure:
$xml = '<rss xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" version="2.0">
<channel>
<item>
<title>Title</title>
<media:group>
<media:content url="url1" />
<media:content url="url2" />
</media:group>
</item>
<item>
<title>Title2</title>
<media:group>
<media:content url="url1" />
<media:content url="url2" />
</media:group>
</item>
</channel>
</rss>';
$xml_data = new SimpleXMLElement($xml);
How do I access the attributes of the media:content nodes? I tried
foreach ($xml_data->channel->item as $key => $data) {
$urls = $data->children('media', true)->children('media', true);
print_r($urls);
}
and
foreach ($xml_data->channel->item as $key => $data) {
$ns = $xml->getNamespaces(true);
$urls = $data->children('media', true)->children($ns['media']);
print_r($urls);
}
as per other answers, but they both return empty SimpleXMLElements.

Answer 1

When you echo out XML with SimpleXML, you need to use asXML() to see the real content, print_r() does it's own version and doesn't show all the content...
foreach ($xml_data->channel->item as $key => $data) {
$urls = $data->children('media', true)->children('media', true);
echo $urls->asXML().PHP_EOL;
}
echos out...
<media:content url="url1"/>
<media:content url="url1"/>
It only outputs the first one of each group as you will need to add another foreach to go through all of the child nodes for each element.
foreach ($xml_data->channel->item as $key => $data) {
echo $data->title.PHP_EOL;
foreach ( $data->children('media', true)->children('media', true) as $content ) {
echo $content->asXML().PHP_EOL;
}
}
outputs..
Title
<media:content url="url1"/>
<media:content url="url2"/>
Title2
<media:content url="url1"/>
<media:content url="url2"/>
To access a particular attribute (so for example the url attribute from the second code example) you have to use the attributes() method...
echo $content->attributes()['url'];