Extracting data from xpath reference of SimpleXMLElement Object - php

Question

I'm trying to read an XML file into an array and I'm having a little bit of trouble. Here is what my code looks like so far:
$inst = new SimpleXMLElement($xml);
foreach( $inst->xpath("record[#id='" . $range . "']") as $u ) {
foreach($fields as $field) {
$results[$field] = $u->$field;
}
}
But when I do print_r($results), this is what's outputted:
Array
(
[field1] => SimpleXMLElement Object
(
[0] => field1Data
)
[field2] => SimpleXMLElement Object
(
[0] => field2Data
)
[field3] => SimpleXMLElement Object
(
[0] => field3Data
)
)
How can I get the data straight from the SimpleXMLElement Object and store it in the array rather than having it do this? I tried accessing it as an array like $u->$field[0] but that didn't work either.

Answer 1

Casting a SimpleXMLElement to string is the general solution(see "Forcing a SimpleXML Object to a string, regardless of context" for the canonical question), for a complete array containing all SimpleXMLElements like returned by xpath() or like you create it your own, a common way is to map the array onto trim:
$results = array_map('trim', $results);
or strval:
$results = array_map('strval', $results);
For example:
$inst = new SimpleXMLElement($xml);
list($u) = $inst->xpath("record[#id='" . $range . "']")
foreach ($fields as $field) {
$results[$field] = $u->$field;
}
$results = array_map('strval', $results);