Remove a child with a specific attribute, in SimpleXML for PHP

Question

I have several identical elements with different attributes that I\'m accessing with SimpleXML:

Answer 1

While SimpleXML provides a way to remove XML nodes, its modification capabilities are somewhat limited. One other solution is to resort to using the DOM extension. dom_import_simplexml() will help you with converting your SimpleXMLElement into a DOMElement.

Just some example code (tested with PHP 5.2.5):

$data='
    
    
    
    
    
';
$doc=new SimpleXMLElement($data);
foreach($doc->seg as $seg)
{
    if($seg['id'] == 'A12') {
        $dom=dom_import_simplexml($seg);
        $dom->parentNode->removeChild($dom);
    }
}
echo $doc->asXml();

outputs

By the way: selecting specific nodes is much more simple when you use XPath (SimpleXMLElement->xpath):

$segs=$doc->xpath('//seq[@id="A12"]');
if (count($segs)>=1) {
    $seg=$segs[0];
}
// same deletion procedure as above