PHP: Get specific value from simplexml array - php

Question

I am pretty new to PHP an XML and hope you can help me with this.
Searching the forum didn't help me yet to find an answer to my specific issue.
I have a PHP page with a simplexml array that looks like the following, just longer:
SimpleXMLElement Object
(
[textID] => Array
(
[0] => SimpleXMLElement Object
(
[textID] => 1
[content] => Text1
)
[1] => SimpleXMLElement Object
(
[textID] => 2
[content] => Text2
)
[2] => SimpleXMLElement Object
(
[textID] => 3
[content] => Text3
)
)
)
Now I am trying to echo out a specific value from this array by referring to its ID which is an integer.
The only way I get this working is the following but this just goes by the order within the array, not by the actual ID:
<?php echo $objTexts->textID[1]->content; ?>
Can someone tell me what I am missing here ?
Thanks, Tim

Answer 1

SimpleXML has no way of knowing that the textID identifies which node is which - it is just another element in the XML.
Based on your sample output, your XML is a little confusing as you have multiple elements called textID which each have a single child, also called textID, which has a different meaning. Nonetheless, what you want to do can be achieved either by looping through all the outer textID elements and testing the value of their inner textID element:
foreach ( $objTexts->textID as $item )
{
if ( $item->textID == '2' )
{
...
}
}
Or, you could use XPath, which is a fairly simple query language for XML, and is supported within SimpleXML in the form of the ->xpath() method. In your case, you want to find a textID node which contains a textID child with a particular value, so the code would look something like this:
// ->xpath always returns a plain PHP array - not a SimpleXML object
$xpath_results = $objTexts->xpath('//textID[textID=2]');
// If you're certain you only want the first result:
echo $xpath_results[0]->content;
// If you might want multiple matches
foreach ( $xpath_results as $item )
{
...
}