Can I find selected options in a form using simplexml? - php

Question

I'm able to find a select's options on a website using the following code:
$dom = new DOMDocument();
$dom->loadHTMLFile('http://webseven.com.au/carl/testpage.htm');
$xml = simplexml_import_dom($dom);
//print_r($xml);
$select = $xml->xpath('//table/tr/td/select');
print_r($select);
I get (as an example)
[0] => SimpleXMLElement Object
(
[#attributes] => Array
(
[name] => product_OnWeb
[tabindex] => 4
)
[option] => Array
(
[0] => Yes
[1] => No
)
)
But I cannot find a way to find which of those is selected. Can this be done with SimpleXML or is there another method?

Answer 1

You need to loop through all the options (using foreach ( $node->option ... )), and check for the selected attribute (using $node['selected']):
$dom = new DOMDocument();
$dom->loadHTMLFile('http://webseven.com.au/carl/testpage.htm');
$xml = simplexml_import_dom($dom);
$selects = $xml->xpath('//table/tr/td/select');
foreach ( $selects as $select_node )
{
echo $select_node['name'] . ': ';
foreach ( $select_node->option as $option_node )
{
if ( isset($option_node['selected']) )
{
echo $option_node['value'] . ' ';
}
}
echo "\n";
}
As an aside, you are likely to be led astray if you use print_r to debug SimpleXML, as it doesn't show you the true state of the object. I've written a simplexml_dump function which might be more useful.