XML Attributes to arrays (PHP) - php

Question

I have an XML which includes many thousands of nodes with information about them in attributes.
Each node is like :
<Class Option1="fiahfs;if" Option2="fiowfr0r0" ClassID="1">
<Class Option1="ro;ewaj;frwajro" Option2="afj;wh;fha" Option3="34014upkla" ClassID="2">
....
I need to parse that info into PHP arrays with array names being attribute names and the number of element in array equal to ClassID Attribute.
The problem is that some nodes have attributes that other nodes I dont have. I previously used ->attributes() for one selected element as
$a => $b,
$$a=array();
then
${$a}[(integer)$products['ClassID']]=$b
Where $products is simplexml element got from parsing XML with xpath. That basically gave me what i needed - i had a few arrays and i could address my requests like $Option1[1] , $Option2[1], Option1[2]...etc.
But the problem is that if I create that structure using only attribute list of one selected element -there`ll be elements that that one element do not have,but other have, and after a create arrays and then parse XML -there'll not be some arrays. Like if i create arrays from [0] of that example, that will give me $Option1, $Option2, but no $Option3.
When I rebuilt my code to :
foreach ($XML->xpath('/idspace/Class') as $products){
foreach($products->attributes() as $a => $b){
if(!isset($$a) $$a=array();
${$a}[(integer)$products['ClassID']]=$b;
}}
And after that I tried to foreach($ClassID) - I`ve got only one element in that array.
How can I parse every XML attribute to array while using attribute "ClassID" as element number in array?

Answer 1

I'm quite confused with your arrays. For me it sounds strange to have an extra array for each attribute. Why not make one array that contains each element and have the attributes as children. So that in the end you get an array like this:
$products = array(
[1] => array(
[Option1] => "fiahfs;if",
[Option2] => "fiowfr0r0",
),
[2] => array(
[Option1] => "ro;ewaj;frwajro",
[Option2] => "afj;wh;fha",
[Option3] => "34014upkla",
),
In this way you can easily access all the attributes for a given ChildId:
$products[$childId]['Option1'] - or better check if the Attribute-Name exists.
You can use simplexml->attributes()
$products = array(); // products will have the result!
foreach ($xml->products as $productXml) { // don't know your xml structure here,
// but you need to iterate over every product in the xml
$singleProduct = array();
$classId = 0;
foreach($productXml->attributes() as $a => $b) {
if ($a == 'ClassID') {
$classId = $b;
} else {
$singleProduct[$a] = $b;
}
}
$products[$classId] = $singleProduct;
}