Simple XML - Dealing With Colons In Nodes

Question

I\'m trying to read an RSS feed from Flickr but it has some nodes which are not readable by Simple XML (media:thumbnail, flickr:profile, and so on)

Answer 1

You're dealing with a namespace? I think you need to use the ->children method.

$ns_dc = $item->children('http://namespace.org/');

Can you provide a snippet with the xml declaration?

Answer 2

The solution is explained in this nice article. You need the children() method for accessing XML elements which contain a namespace. This code snippet is quoted from the article:

$feed = simplexml_load_file('http://www.sitepoint.com/recent.rdf'); 
foreach ($feed->item as $item) { 
    $ns_dc = $item->children('http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/'); 
    echo $ns_dc->date; 
}

Answer 3

With the latest version, you can now reference colon nodes with curly brackets.

$item->{'itunes:duration'}

Answer 4

An even simpler method using PHP of accessing namespaced XML nodes without declaring a namespace is....

In order to get the value of <su:authorEmail> from the following source

<item>
  <title>My important article</title>
  <pubDate>Mon, 29 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
  <link>https://myxmlsource.com/32984</link>
  <guid>https://myxmlsource.com/32984</guid>
  <author>Blogs, Jo</author>
  <su:departments>
    <su:department>Human Affairs</su:department>
  </su:departments>
  <su:authorHash>4f329b923419b3cb2c654d615e22588c</su:authorHash>
  <su:authorEmail>hIwW14tLc+4l/oo7agmRrcjwe531u+mO/3IG3xe5jMg=</su:authorEmail>
  <dc:identifier>/32984/Download/0032984-11042.docx</dc:identifier>
  <dc:format>Journal article</dc:format>
  <dc:creator>Blogs, Jo</dc:creator>
  <slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
</item>

Use the following code:

$rss = new DOMDocument();

$rss->load('https://myxmlsource.com/rss/xml');

$nodes = $rss->getElementsByTagName('item');

foreach ($nodes as $node) {
    $title = $node->getElementsByTagName('title')->item(0)->nodeValue;
    $author = $node->getElementsByTagName('author')->item(0)->nodeValue;
    $authorHash = $node->getElementsByTagName('authorHash')->item(0)->nodeValue;
    $department = $node->getElementsByTagName('department')->item(0)->nodeValue;
    $email = decryptEmail($node->getElementsByTagName('authorEmail')->item(0)->nodeValue);
}