How to get the specific inner node with SimpleXml? - php

Question

my xml is structured as follow:
<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<user>
<name>
foo
</name>
<token>
jfhsjfhksdjfhsjkfhksjfsdk
</token>
<connection>
<host>
localhost
</host>
<username>
root
</username>
<dbName>
Test
</dbName>
<dbPass>
123456789
</dbPass>
</connection>
</user>
<user>
... same structure...
</user>
I made this code that iterate through all xml node:
function getConString($node)
{
$item = file_get_contents($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . "con");
$nodes = new SimpleXMLElement($item);
$result = $nodes[0];
foreach($result as $item => $value)
{
if($item == "token")
{
return $value->__toString();
}
}
}
what I'm trying to achieve is that when $node is equal to:
jfhsjfhksdjfhsjkfhksjfsdk
the connection node is returned as array, how I can achieve this?

Answer 1

If the XML you're trying to parse is what you've posted here, it's invalid since
XML documents must contain one root element that is the parent of all other elements:
http://www.w3schools.com/xml/xml_syntax.asp
(and yours doesn't, and parsing such string fails with Exception: String could not be parsed as XML in ...).
So your XML should be:
<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<users>
<user>
<name>
foo
</name>
<token>
jfhsjfhksdjfhsjkfhksjfsdk
</token>
<connection>
<host>
localhost
</host>
<username>
root
</username>
<dbName>
Test
</dbName>
<dbPass>
123456789
</dbPass>
</connection>
</user>
<user>
... same structure...
</user>
</users>
And you don't need to iterate through the collection
// $nodes is SimpleXMLElement
$user = $nodes->user[0];
if($user->token)
return $user->token->__toString();