PHP iterating over an XML - php

Question

How can I convert XML to an array that I can iterate over.
Here is the example of my XML
<user>
<student>yes</student>
<id>1</id>
<name>John</name>
</user>
<user>
<student>yes</student>
<id>1</id>
<name>Billy</name>
</user>
My php looks like this
$tmpTemplates = new XDomDocument();
$tmpTemplates->load('.....myFile.xml');
$xPath = new DomXPath($tmpTemplates);
$query = "//user[student='yes']";
$tmpTemplate = $xPath->query($query);
What I want to be able to do is
foreach($tmpTemplate as $tt){
var_dump($tt->student);
var_dump($tt->id);
var_dump($tt->name);
}
Now I'm only able to print out nodeValue which gives me something like this:
yes
1
John
How can I make it an array or an object so I can apprach each value by its key?

Answer 1

You used the same id for both records in your example, so I changed the id of the first one and added a document element.
<users>
<user>
<student>yes</student>
<id>2</id>
<name>John</name>
</user>
<user>
<student>yes</student>
<id>1</id>
<name>Billy</name>
</user>
</users>
Use DOMXpath:evaluate() to fetch the details, the second argument is the context node for the expression.
$document = new DOMDocument();
$document->loadXml($xmlString);
$xPath = new DomXPath($document);
$students = [];
foreach ($xPath->evaluate("//user[student='yes']") as $student) {
$id = $xPath->evaluate('string(id)', $student);
$students[$id] = [
'id' => $id,
'name' => $xPath->evaluate('string(name)', $student)
];
}
var_dump($students);
Output:
array(2) {
[2]=>
array(2) {
["id"]=>
string(1) "2"
["name"]=>
string(4) "John"
}
[1]=>
array(2) {
["id"]=>
string(1) "1"
["name"]=>
string(5) "Billy"
}
}
The return value depends on the expression. A location path like //user[student='yes'] or name returns a DOMNodeList. But you can cast the node list directly in Xpath. string(name) will return the contents of the first name child node or an empty string.

Answer 2

How can I make it an array or an object so I can apprach each value by its key?
Just for clarification, you've got an object so far, it's the SimpleXMLElement and you're using then $tt variable to access it:
...
var_dump($tt->student);
var_dump($tt->id);
var_dump($tt->name);
...
Now that $tt variable comes from another variable, namely by iterating over it, and the other variable is named $tmpTemplate:
...
foreach ($tmpTemplate as $tt) {
var_dump($tt->student);
...
That variable by the way is an array. So you can use it by using the index (starting at zero) to access each <user> element containing a <student> child-element with the value "student" in document-order (as you formulated the xpath for it):
$tmpTemplate[0] contains the first user SimpleXMLElement.
$tmpTemplate[1] contains the second user SimpleXMLElement.
... and so on and so forth.
I hope this makes this a bit more visible.

Answer 3

Try with this php function
xml_parse_into_struct
sample from php manual
<?php
$simple = "<para><note>simple note</note></para>";
$p = xml_parser_create();
xml_parse_into_struct($p, $simple, $vals, $index);
xml_parser_free($p);
echo "Index array\n";
print_r($index);
echo "\nVals array\n";
print_r($vals);
?>

Answer 4

You can use simplexml_load_file, which convert xml to object.
For instance :
$users = simplexml_load_file("users.xml");
foreach($users as $user) {
...
}