Selecting only the first item of an xpath result set in PHP

Question

I am currently achieving the desired outcome with two PHP statements:

$thisBlarg = $xmlResource->xpath('//blarg[@ID='.$someBlargID.']');
echo $thisBlarg[0]->name;

But, not wanting to settle for second best, I'd really prefer this to be one statement, but PHP doesn't like this:

echo $xmlResource->xpath('//blarg[@ID='.$someBlargID.']')[0]->name;

And for good reason. But I can't find a way to force an xpath query to return the result directly. Any suggestions?

Is `name` an element that is child of `blarg` or is it something PHP-specific? — Dimitre Novatchev, May 06 '10 at 03:11
Sorry, should have been clearer. My example assumes that $xmlResource was instantiated as such: $xmlResource = simplexml_load_file('someXMLfile.xml'); So, the 'name' property corresponds to one of the elements of the supposed XML file. — MBuscemi, May 08 '10 at 03:18

score 3 · Accepted Answer · edited Jul 13 '13 at 10:10

3

Try this

echo current(($xmlResource->xpath('//blarg[@ID='.$someBlargID.']')))->name;

edited Jul 13 '13 at 10:10

hakre

answered May 06 '10 at 04:12

Rwky

1 Answers1