how to get the values from this xml using dom in php? - php

Question

how can i get the values of a,b and c from the following xml code?
<result name="response" f="139" c="0">
−
<doc score="5.06756" pos="0">
<snippet name="a" highlighted="yes">example</snippet>
<snippet name="b" highlighted="yes">bexample</snippet>
<snippet name="c">cexample</snippet>
</doc>
</result>
I tried to print the nodes, but It failed:
$xmlDoc = new DOMDocument();
$xmlDoc->load($content);
$x = $xmlDoc->documentElement;
foreach ($x->childNodes AS $item)
{
print $item->nodeName . " = " . $item->nodeValue . "<br />";
}
Can anyone tell me how I can parse it? I cannot use simple xml, so I am moving to Dom.

Answer 1

Using DOM allows you to use several distinct ways of extracting informations.
For example, you could work with :
DOMDocument::getElementsByTagName, to extract all tags having a specific name.
Or DOMXPath, for more complex queries.
As an example, here's a portion of code that demonstrates how to use the first solution to extract all <snippet> tags :
$snippets = $xmlDoc->getElementsByTagName('snippet');
foreach ($snippets as $tag) {
echo $tag->getAttribute('name') . ' = ' . $tag->nodeValue . '<br />';
}
And you'd get this output :
a = example
b = bexample
c = cexample
And, as another example, here's a solution that demonstrates how to use the second solution, to do a more complex query on the XML data -- here, extracting the <snippet> tag that as it's name attribute with a value of a :
$xpath = new DOMXPath($xmlDoc);
$snippetsA = $xpath->query('//snippet[#name="a"]');
if ($snippetsA->length > 0) {
foreach ($snippetsA as $tag) {
echo $tag->getAttribute('name') . ' = ' . $tag->nodeValue . '<br />';
}
}
Which only gets you one result -- the corresponding tag :
a = example
Starting from here, the possibilities are almost limitless ;-)