DOM in PHP: Decoded entities and setting nodeValue

Question

I want to perform certain manipulations on a XML document with PHP using the DOM part of its standard library. As others have already discovered, one has to deal with decode

Answer 1

As hakre explained, the problem is that in PHP's DOM library, the behaviour of setting nodeValue w.r.t. entities depends on the class of the node, in particular DOMText and DOMElement differ in this regard. To illustrate this, an example:

$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->formatOutput = True;
$doc->loadXML('');

$s = 'text &<<"\'&text;&text';

$root = $doc->documentElement;

$node = $doc->createElement('tag1', $s); #line 10
$root->appendChild($node);

$node = $doc->createElement('tag2');
$text = $doc->createTextNode($s);
$node->appendChild($text);
$root->appendChild($node);

$node = $doc->createElement('tag3');
$text = $doc->createCDATASection($s);
$node->appendChild($text);
$root->appendChild($node);

echo $doc->saveXML();

outputs

Warning: DOMDocument::createElement(): unterminated entity reference            text in /tmp/DOMtest.php on line 10


  text &<<"'&text;
  text &amp;&lt;<"'&text;&text
  

---

In this particular case, it is appropriate to alter the nodeValue of DOMText nodes. Combining hakre's two answers one gets a quite elegant solution.

$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->loadXML();

$xpath     = new DOMXPath($doc);
$node_list = $xpath->query();

$visitTextNode = function (DOMText $node) {
    $text = $node->textContent;
    /*
        do something with $text
    */
   $node->nodeValue = $text;
};

foreach ($node_list as $node) {
    if ($node->nodeType == XML_TEXT_NODE) {
        $visitTextNode($node);
    } else {
        foreach ($node->childNodes as $child) {
            if ($child->nodeType == XML_TEXT_NODE) {
                $visitTextNode($child);
            }
        }
    }
}