Getting name spaces out of XML from simplexml_load_file in php - php

Question

I am trying to parse this YouTube XML using simplexml_load_file in php.
The XML feed can be found here:
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=PL1mm1FfX5EHRjGyoBpEXBRIGAmCNt8pBT
Below in php I am trying to iterate through the media groups nested inside each entry node.
<?php
$xmlFeed=simplexml_load_file('https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=PL1mm1FfX5EHRjGyoBpEXBRIGAmCNt8pBT')
or die("Cannot load YouTube video feed, please try again later.");
foreach ($xmlFeed->entry->children('media', true)->group as $video) {
echo $video->title;
echo $video->description;
echo $video->thumbnail->getNameSpaces(true);
}
?>
Title and description print just fine. But I'm trying to get at the thumbnail URL found in this namespace:
<media:thumbnail url="https://i1.ytimg.com/vi/HEYQXVGnwXc/hqdefault.jpg" width="480" height="360"/>
I've tried all 3 of the following:
echo $video->thumbnail->getNameSpaces(true);
echo $video->thumbnail->getNameSpaces(true)['url'];
echo $video->thumbnail->getNameSpaces(true)->url;
None return the url. The first returns Array and the last two are blank. What am I missing?

Answer 1

Several things: first, you have to use the attributes() function since there is no child of thumbnail. Secondly, you don't need to declare getNameSpaces(true) since the namespace prefix media is done in the for loop. Finally, you do not iterate across all media:group. Right now, you will return only the first set of xml values, not both from each <entry> node. Therefore, you need to add an outer loop -one that iterates across the frequency of <entry> nodes.
$attr = 'url';
for($i = 0; $i < sizeof($xmlFeed->entry); $i++) {
foreach ($xmlFeed->entry[$i]->children('media', true)->group as $video) {
echo $video->title."\n";
echo $video->description."\n";
echo $video->thumbnail->attributes()->$attr."\n";
}
}
XPATH Alternative
Even further, you could have handled your needs in XPath by simply registering the media namespace and querying to exact locations, iterating of course across each set:
$xmlFeed->registerXPathNamespace('media', 'http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/');
// ARRAYS TO HOLD XML VALUES
$videos = $xmlFeed->xpath('//media:group');
$title = $xmlFeed->xpath('//media:group/media:title');
$description = $xmlFeed->xpath('//media:group/media:description');
$url = $xmlFeed->xpath('//media:group/media:thumbnail/#url');
// ITERATING THROUGH EACH ARRAY
for($i = 0; $i < sizeof($videos); $i++) {
echo $title[$i]."\n";
echo $description[$i]."\n";
echo $url[$i]."\n";
}