Parsing an XML with Xpath in PHP - php

Question

Consider the following code :
$dom = new DOMDocument();
$dom->loadXML($file);
$xmlPath = new DOMXPath($dom);
$arrNodes = $xmlPath->query('*/item');
foreach($arrNodes as $item){
//missing code
}
The $file is an xml and each item has a title and a description.
How can I display them (title and description)?
$file = "<item>
<title>test_title</title>
<desc>test</desc>
</item>";

Answer 1

I suggest using php's simplexml, with that, you still get xpath functionality, but with easier approach, for example you would access attributes like this:
$name = $item['name'];
Here's an example:
xmlfile.xml:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xml>
<items>
<item title="Hello World" description="Hellowing the world.." />
<item title="Hello People" description="greeting people.." />
</items>
</xml>
do.php:
<?php
$xml_str = file_get_contents('xmlfile.xml');
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($xml_str);
$items = $xml->xpath('*/item');
foreach($items as $item) {
echo $item['title'], ': ', $item['description'], "\n";
}

Answer 2

If your item looks like this:
<item>
<title>foo</title>
<description>frob</description>
</item>
You could use getElementsByTagName() and nodeValue:
foreach($arrNodes as $item){
print $item->getElementsByTagName('title')->item(0)->nodeValue;
}
Are title and description attributes? E. g. does an item look like this:
<item title="foo" description="frob" />
If so, you could just use getAttribute():
...
foreach($arrNodes as $item){
print $item->getAttribute('title');
}

Answer 3

The right XPath expression should be:
/*/item/title | /*/item/desc
Or
/*/item/*[self::title or self::desc]
This is evaluate to a node set with title and desc element in document order