Access an element's parent with PHP's SimpleXML?

Question

I\'m iterating through a set of SimpleXML objects, and I can\'t figure out how to access each object\'s parent node. Here\'s what I want:

$divs = simplexml-         


        

Answer 1

$div->get_parent_node(); // Sadly, there's no such function.

Note that you can extend SimpleXML to make it so. For example:

class my_xml extends SimpleXMLElement
{
    public function get_parent_node()
    {
        return current($this->xpath('parent::*'));
    }
}

And now all you have to do is modify the code you use to create your SimpleXMLElement in the first place:

$foo = new SimpleXMLElement('');
// becomes
$foo = new my_xml('');

$foo = simplexml_load_string('');
// becomes
$foo = simplexml_load_string('', 'my_xml');

$foo = simplexml_load_file('foo.xml');
// becomes
$foo = simplexml_load_file('foo.xml', 'my_xml');

The best part is that SimpleXML will automatically and transparently return my_xml objects for this document, so you don't have to change anything else, which makes your get_parent_node() method chainable:

// returns $grandchild's parent's parent
$grandchild->get_parent_node()->get_parent_node();