PHP: getting only 1 result from XML collection - php

Question

I'm trying to read an XML file with PHP but I'm only getting the first result and can't figure out why.
XML structure:
<main>
<data>
<record>
<column name="title">Some title here</column>
</record>
<record>
<column name="title">Some second title here</column>
</record>
</data>
</main>
Pretty basic. This is the code I'm using to getting the results:
foreach($XML->data->record as $product) {
$title = mysql_real_escape_string($product->title);
}
But this only gives an empty string so I guess I'm looking at the wrong path. The code below does work, but only gives me the first record and not the other records in the XML file.
foreach($XML->data as $product) {
$title = mysql_real_escape_string($product->record->title);
}
The answer is probably easy, but I can't figure it out. Hope someone is willing to help :)

Answer 1

title is the value of the name attribute of the <column> node.
You can't access it the way you do it.
To access the <column> node:
$xml = simplexml_load_string($x); // assume XML in $x
foreach ($xml->data->record as $product) {
echo $product->column;
}
Output:
Some title here
Some second title here
see it working: https://eval.in/506519
If there are many columns under each record...
<record>
<column name="title">Some title here</column>
<column name="car">BMW</column>
<column name="color">red</column>
</record>
... and you want to list all, you need a second loop:
foreach ($xml->data->record as $product) { // same as above
foreach ($product->column as $column) { // iterate all column
echo $column['name'] . ": " . $column . PHP_EOL;
}
}
Output:
title: Some title here
car: BMW
color: red
see it working: https://eval.in/506521
In case you want only <column> nodes with name = "title", check with if:
foreach ($xml->data->record as $product) { // same as above
foreach ($product->column as $column) { // iterate all column
if ($column['name'] == "title") echo $column . PHP_EOL;
}
}
see it working: https://eval.in/506523
And be aware that there is a different way to get all <column> with name = "title" with xpath:
$titles = $xml->xpath("//column[#name = 'title']");
foreach ($titles as $title)
echo $title . PHP_EOL;
see it in action: https://eval.in/506531
For an explanation of the xpath syntax, look at Using xPath to access values of simpleXML and zillion others.
and BTW: as said in comments, don't use mysql_...

Answer 2

Not tested but looks ok. Load the xml file / string into DOMDocument and get all the column nodes and iterate through them
$dom=new DOMDocument;
$dom->loadXML( $strxml );
/*
or
--
$dom->load( $xmlfile );
*/
$col=$dom->getElementsByTagName('column');
foreach( $col as $node ){
echo $node->tagName.' '.$node->getAttribute('title').' '.$node->nodeValue;
}