Creating sub element in XML

Question

I am trying to accomplish the following:

Harry potter
Adven         


        

Answer 1

What you need to do here, is append the author details to the author element and not the root element. So something like this would work:

header('Content-Type: text/xml;'); 
$doc = new DOMDocument('1.0');
$doc->formatOutput = true;

$book = $doc->createElement("book");
$doc->appendChild($book);

$author = $doc->createElement("author");
$book->appendChild($author); // add author as child of book

// you can add content at the same time as creating the element
$author_name = $doc->createElement("author_name", "John Doe");
// append author name to author element
$author->appendChild($author_name); 

echo $doc->saveXML();

Also note that you can save some space creating text nodes by adding the text inside createElement, though that may not suffice in cetain circumstances as the value is not escaped (ref: php.net - I just used it here for quickness).

Sample output:

<book>
  <author>
    <author_name>John Doe</author_name>
  </author>
</book>

Answer 2

Affffding nodes to the DOM requires 3 Steps

1. Create the node using Document methods like createElement() or createTextNode()
2. Configure the node and append child nodes
3. Append the node to its parent node

Step 2 and 3 are exchangeable. You can configure a node after you appended it or before. appendChild() returns the append node.

I indented the calls depending on the level in the result xml:

$doc = new DOMDocument('1.0');
$doc->formatOutput = true;

$books = $doc->appendChild($doc->createElement('books'));
  $book = $books->appendChild($doc->createElement('book'));
    $name = $book->appendChild($doc->createElement('name'));
      $name->appendChild($doc->createTextNode('Harry potter'));
    $category = $book->appendChild($doc->createElement('category'));
      $category->appendChild($doc->createTextNode('Adventure | Family | Fantasy'));
    $pages = $book->appendChild($doc->createElement('pages'));
      $pages->appendChild($doc->createTextNode('850'));

    $author = $book->appendChild($doc->createElement('author'));
      $authorName = $author->appendChild($doc->createElement('author_name'));
        $authorName->appendChild($doc->createTextNode('John Doe'));
      $authorWiki = $author->appendChild($doc->createElement('author_wiki'));
        $authorWiki->appendChild($doc->createTextNode('http://wikipedia....'));

    $description = $book->appendChild($doc->createElement('description'));
      $description->appendChild($doc->createTextNode('lorem ipsum blabla'));

echo $doc->saveXML();