PHP get values from SimpleXMLElement array

Question

I have this:

  [1]=>
object(SimpleXMLElement)#6 (1) {
  [\"@attributes\"]=>
  array(14) {
    [\"name\"]=>
    string(5) \"MySQL\"
    [\"acknowledg         


        

Answer 1

Kind of messy, but I used this successfully

foreach($xml->data->children() as $child) {
//var_dump($child);
    foreach ($child->attributes() as $a => $b) {
     echo $a . '=' . $b . '<br />';
    }
}

Not sure why, but the OpsView API returns a two-dimensional array instead of just having one value per XML node :(

echo $child['name'];

works and is much more elegant, thank you.

Answer 2

While you can do:

echo $child['name'];

to see the value, you should note that $child['name'] is an object, not a string. Echoing it casts it to a string, so it works in that situation. But if you're storing it somewhere, it's better to cast it to a string yourself:

$name = (string) $child['name'];

Answer 3

I had a similar problem, I needed to get the string out of my SimpleXMLElement, I couldn't find the name to call it. Found the solution, by using (string) to get the string text:

foreach ($lines as $line) {
    array_push($result, new line(**(string)**$line));
}

array
  0 => 
    object(line)[190]
      private '_line' => 
        object(SimpleXMLElement)[128]
          public '@attributes' => 
            array
              ...
          string ' ' (length=1)
  1 => 
    object(line)[191]
      private '_line' => 
        object(SimpleXMLElement)[131]
          public '@attributes' => 
            array
              ...
          string ' ' (length=1)
  2 => 
    object(line)[192]
      private '_line' => 
        object(SimpleXMLElement)[132]
          public '@attributes' => 
            array
              ...
          string ' ~54**** I N V O I C E ****' (length=27)

Answer 4

With SimpleXML, you can get :

• sub-elements, using object notation : $element->subElement
• and attributes, using array notation : $element['attribute']

So, here, I'd say you'd have to use :

echo $child['name'];

As a reference, and for a couple of examples, see the Basic usage section of simplexml's manual.

Example #6 should be the interesting one, about attributes.