PHP and XML: getElementByType - php

Question

I'm somewhat new to php and I'm trying to loop through my XML file in order to extract data and display it in HTML. I know how to do the display to HTML part, but I'm a little confused for what to do for the XML part.
Here is a sample file of what I am trying to do (you can picture it as a categorized list of movies where groupType would be genre):
<mainGroup>
<groupHeading type="heading">This is a sample heading</groupHeading>
<group type="groupType1">
<title>Title1</title>
<date when="0001"></date>
</group>
<group type="groupType1">
<title>Title2</title>
<date when="0002"></date>
</group>
<group type="groupType2">
<title>Title3</title>
<date when="0003"></date>
</group>
</mainGroup>
... There are more mainGroups with differet group types etc
Basically, I will have 10+ mainGroups, with many different groups inside of it, so I need a way to loop through these using php. The main problem is the fact that I need someway to "getElementBy Type()", but that does not exist.
If anything is confusing, I can elaborate more, I'm still a novice to php so I hope I can do this.

Answer 1

real simple --> use PHP's simplexml ---> live demo: http://codepad.viper-7.com/i4MRGI
$xmlstr = '<mainGroup>
<groupHeading type="heading">This is a sample heading</groupHeading>
<group type="groupType1">
<title>Title1</title>
<date when="0001"></date>
</group>
<group type="groupType1">
<title>Title2</title>
<date when="0002"></date>
</group>
<group type="groupType2">
<title>Title3</title>
<date when="0003"></date>
</group>
</mainGroup>';
// create simplexml object
$xml=simplexml_load_string($xmlstr);
// loop through all <groupheading>, we use an xpath-query...
foreach ($xml->xpath("//groupHeading") as $gh) {
echo($gh),'<br />';
}
// now the titles under every group with groupType1...
foreach ($xml->xpath("//group[#type='groupType1']/title") as $gt1) {
echo $gt1,'<br />';
}
EDIT: echo title of each groupHeading, then titles of child-nodes if grouptype=1:
---> see new demo: http://codepad.viper-7.com/eMuyr5
foreach ($xml->groupHeading as $gh) {
echo($gh),'<br />';
foreach ($gh->xpath("//group[#type='groupType1']/title") as $gt1) {
echo $gt1,'<br />';
}
}

Answer 2

You could use PHP DOM
If you wanted to search groups for a particular type and then get the results you could do something like this:
EDIT - $string would be your XML. If you needed to load it from a file you can do
$string = file_get_contents('/path/to/your/file');
$dom = new DOMDocument;
$dom->loadXML($string);
$searchtype = "groupType1";
$results = array();
$groups = $dom->getElementsByTagName('group');
foreach( $groups as $g ) {
if( $g->getAttribute('type') == $searchtype ) {
$results[] = array(
'title' =>$g->getElementsByTagName('title')->item(0)->nodeValue,
'date' =>$g->getElementsByTagName('date')->item(0)->getAttribute('when')
);
}
}
print_r($results);