SimpleXml to string - php

Question

Is there any function that makes string from PHP SimpleXMLElement?

Answer 1

You can use the SimpleXMLElement::asXML() method to accomplish this:
$string = "<element><child>Hello World</child></element>";
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($string);
// The entire XML tree as a string:
// "<element><child>Hello World</child></element>"
$xml->asXML();
// Just the child node as a string:
// "<child>Hello World</child>"
$xml->child->asXML();

Answer 2

You can use casting:
<?php
$string = "<element><child>Hello World</child></element>";
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($string);
$text = (string)$xml->child;
$text will be 'Hello World'

Answer 3

You can use the asXML method as:
<?php
// string to SimpleXMLElement
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($string);
// make any changes.
....
// convert the SimpleXMLElement back to string.
$newString = $xml->asXML();
?>

Answer 4

Actually asXML() converts the string into xml as it name says:
<id>5</id>
This will display normally on a web page but it will cause problems when you matching values with something else.
You may use strip_tags function to get real value of the field like:
$newString = strip_tags($xml->asXML());
PS: if you are working with integers or floating numbers, you need to convert it into integer with intval() or floatval().
$newNumber = intval(strip_tags($xml->asXML()));

Answer 5

You can use ->child to get a child element named child.
This element will contain the text of the child element.
But if you try var_dump() on that variable, you will see it is not actually a PHP string.
The easiest way around this is to perform a strval(xml->child);
That will convert it to an actual PHP string.
This is useful when debugging when looping your XML and using var_dump() to check the result.
So $s = strval($xml->child);.

Answer 6

Here is a function I wrote to solve this issue (assuming tag has no attributes). This function will keep HTML formatting in the node:
function getAsXMLContent($xmlElement)
{
$content=$xmlElement->asXML();
$end=strpos($content,'>');
if ($end!==false)
{
$tag=substr($content, 1, $end-1);
return str_replace(array('<'.$tag.'>', '</'.$tag.'>'), '', $content);
}
else
return '';
}
$string = "<element><child>Hello World</child></element>";
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($string);
echo getAsXMLContent($xml->child); // prints Hello World

Answer 7

Sometimes you can simply typecast:
// this is the value of my $xml
object(SimpleXMLElement)#10227 (1) {
[0]=>
string(2) "en"
}
$s = (string) $xml; // returns "en";

Answer 8

Probably depending on the XML feed you may/may not need to use __toString(); I had to use the __toString() otherwise it is returning the string inside an SimpleXMLElement. Maybe I need to drill down the object further ...