Parsing XML file - php

Question

I've got a problem with parsing an XML file (nb. well formed one).
Consider XML file like this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<root>
<list>
<item no="1">
<title>Item's 1 title</title>
<content>Some long content with <special>tags</special> inside</content>
</item>
<item no="2">
<title>Item's 2 title</title>
<content>Some long content with <special>tags</special> inside</content>
</item>
</list>
</root>
I need to get contents contents of each item in the list and put them in an array. Generally not a problem, but in this case, I can't get my head round it.
Problem lays in <content> contents. It is string with tags in-between. I can't find a way to extract the contents. SimpleXML returns/echoes just the string with anything including and inside <special> tags stripped out. Like this:
Some long content with inside.
I'd ideally want it to get a string like this:
Some long content with <special>tags</special> inside
How do I get it?

Answer 1

You could use DOMDocument which is built into PHP.
<?php
$xml = <<<END
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<root>
<list>
<item no="1">
<title>Item's 1 title</title>
<content>Some long content with <special>tags</special> inside</content>
</item>
<item no="2">
<title>Item's 2 title</title>
<content>Some long content with <special>tags</special> inside</content>
</item>
</list>
</root>
END;
$doc = new DOMDocument('1.0', 'UTF-8');
$doc->loadXML($xml);
$nodes = $doc->getElementsByTagName('content');
foreach ( $nodes as $node )
{
$temp_doc = new DOMDocument('1.0', 'UTF-8');
foreach ( $node->childNodes as $child )
$temp_doc->appendChild($temp_doc->importNode($child, true));
echo $temp_doc->saveHTML(); // Outputs: Some long content with <special>tags</special> inside
}
To select the top level "content" elements (in case there are "content" elements inside), you can use DOMXPath.
$doc = new DOMDocument('1.0', 'UTF-8');
$doc->loadXML($xml); // $xml from the example above
$xpath = new DOMXPath($doc);
$nodes = $xpath->query('/root/list/item/content');
foreach ( $nodes as $node )
{
$temp_doc = new DOMDocument('1.0', 'UTF-8');
foreach ( $node->childNodes as $child )
$temp_doc->appendChild($temp_doc->importNode($child, true));
echo $temp_doc->saveHTML(); // Outputs: Some long content with <special>tags</special> inside
}

Answer 2

SimpleXML just doesn't support mixed content (text nodes with element nodes as siblings). I suggest you use XMLReader instead.

Answer 3

You could use SimpleXML's asXML function. It will return that called node as the xml string;
$xml = simplexml_load_file($file);
foreach($xml->list->item as $item) {
$content = $item->contents->asXML();
echo $content."\n";
}
will print:
<content>Some long content with <special>tags</special> inside</content>
<content>Some long content with <special>tags</special> inside</content>
it's a little ugly but you could then clip out the <content> and </content> with a substr:
$content = substr($content,9,-10);