Extract pattern from xml file using PHP? - php

Question

I have a remote XML file. I need to read, find some values an save them in an array.
I've got load the file with (no problem with this):
$xml_external_path = 'http://example.com/my-file.xml';
$xml = file_get_contents($xml_external_path);
In this file there are many instances of:
<unico>4241</unico>
<unico>234</unico>
<unico>534534</unico>
<unico>2345334</unico>
I need to extract just the number of these strings and save them in a array. I guess I need to use a pattern like:
$pattern = '/<unico>(.*?)<\/unico>/';
But I'm not sure what to do next. Keep in mind that it is an .xml file.
Result should be a populated array like this:
$my_array = array (4241, 234, 534534,2345334);

Answer 1

You can better use XPath to read through an XML file. XPath is a variant of DOMDocument focused on reading and editing XML files. You can query an XPath variable using patterns, which is based on the simple Unix path syntax. So // means anywhere and ./ means relative to selected node. XPath->query() will return a DOMNodelist with all the nodes according to the pattern. The following code will do what you want:
$xmlFile = "
<unico>4241</unico>
<unico>234</unico>
<unico>534534</unico>
<unico>2345334</unico>";
$xmlDoc = new DOMDocument();
$xmlDoc->loadXML($xmlFile);
$xpath = new DOMXPath($xmlDoc);
// This code returns a DOMNodeList of all nodes with the unico tags in the file.
$unicos = $xpath->query("//unico");
//This returns an integer of how many nodes were found that matched the pattern
echo $unicos->length;
You can find more info on XPath and its syntax here: XPath on Wikipedia#syntax
DOMNodeList implements Traversable, so you can use foreach() to traverse it. If you really want a flat array you can simply convert is using simple code like in question #15807314:
$unicosArr = array();
foreach($unicos as $node){
$unicosArr[] = $node->nodeValue;
}

Answer 2

Using preg_match_all:
<?php
$xml = '<unico>4241</unico>
<unico>234</unico>
<unico>534534</unico>
<unico>2345334</unico>';
$pattern = '/<unico>(.*?)<\/unico>/';
preg_match_all($pattern,$xml,$result);
print_r($result[0]);

Answer 3

You could try this, it basically just loops through each line of the file and finds whatever is between the XML <unico> tags.
<?php
$file = "./your.xml";
$pattern = '/<unico>(.*?)<\/unico>/';
$allVars = array();
$currentFile = fopen($file, "r");
if ($currentFile) {
// Read through file
while (!feof($currentFile)) {
$m_sLine = fgets($currentFile);
// Check for sitename validity
if (preg_match($pattern, $m_sLine) == true) {
$curVar = explode("<unico>", $m_sLine);
$curVar = explode("</unico>", $curVar[1]);
$allVars[] = $curVar[0];
}
}
}
fclose($currentFile);
print_r($allVars);
Is this sort of what you want? :)