Get child elements in xml with PHP - php

Question

I have an xml file that I need to parse through and get values. Below is a snippit of xml
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<mobile>
<userInfo>
</userInfo>
<CATALOG>
<s0>
<SUB0>
<DESCR>Paranormal Studies</DESCR>
<SUBJECT>147</SUBJECT>
</SUB0>
</s0>
<sA>
<SUB0>
<DESCR>Accounting</DESCR>
<SUBJECT>ACCT</SUBJECT>
</SUB0>
<SUB1>
<DESCR>Accounting</DESCR>
<SUBJECT>ACCTG</SUBJECT>
</SUB1>
<SUB2>
<DESCR>Anatomy</DESCR>
<SUBJECT>ANATOMY</SUBJECT>
</SUB2>
<SUB3>
<DESCR>Anthropology</DESCR>
<SUBJECT>ANTHRO</SUBJECT>
</SUB3>
<SUB4>
<DESCR>Art</DESCR>
<SUBJECT>ART</SUBJECT>
</SUB4>
<SUB5>
<DESCR>Art History</DESCR>
<SUBJECT>ARTHIST</SUBJECT>
</SUB5>
</sA>
So, I need to grab all the child elements of <sA> and then there are more elements called <sB> etc
But I do not know how to get all of the child elements with <sA>, <sB>, etc.

Answer 1

How about this:
$xmlstr = LoadTheXMLFromSomewhere();
$xml = new simplexml_load_string($xmlstr);
$result = $xml->xpath('//sA');
foreach ($result as $node){
//do something with node
}
PHP does have a nice class to access XML, which is called SimpleXml for a reason, consider heavily using that if your code is going to access only a part of the XML (aka query the xml). Also, consider doing queries using XPath, which is the best way to do it
Notice that I did the example with sA nodes only, but you can configure your code for other node types really easily.
Hope I can help!

Answer 2

you should look into simplexml_load_string() as I'm pretty sure it would make your life a lot easier. It returns a StdObject that you can use like so:
$xml = simplexml_load_string(<your huge xml string>);
foreach ($xml->hpt_mobile->CATALOG->sA as $value){
// do things with sA children
}

Answer 3

$xml = new DOMDocument();
$xml->load('path_to_xml');
$htp = $xml->getElementsByTagName('hpt_mobile')[0];
$catalog = $htp->getElementsByTagName('CATALOG')[0]
$nodes = $catalog->getElementsByTagName('sA')->childNodes;