SimpleXml to string

Question

Is there any function that makes string from PHP SimpleXMLElement?

What kind of string do you want? – Shamim Hafiz - MSFT Sep 11 '10 at 12:18 — Shamim Hafiz - MSFT, Sep 11 '10 at 12:18

score 138 · Accepted Answer · 2013-07-31T16:20:14.283

138

You can use the SimpleXMLElement::asXML() method to accomplish this:

$string = "<element><child>Hello World</child></element>";
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($string);

// The entire XML tree as a string:
// "<element><child>Hello World</child></element>"
$xml->asXML();

// Just the child node as a string:
// "<child>Hello World</child>"
$xml->child->asXML();

edited Jul 31 '13 at 16:20

answered Sep 11 '10 at 12:46

22

`$string = $xml->child->__toString();` – Luke Snowden Jan 27 '15 at 22:17
htmlspecialchars( $xml->asXML() ) ? – zloctb Oct 24 '15 at 05:19
2

but yo are left with the tags, what if you don't want the tags? other answers solve this problem – Andrew Jan 26 '16 at 20:46
Don't use @LukeSnowden's method as this isn't supposed to be called directly. The actual correct answer is Nicolay77's answer which uses casting. – user2924019 Feb 15 '22 at 16:45

score 74 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 23 '12 at 20:33

74

You can use casting:

<?php

$string = "<element><child>Hello World</child></element>";
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($string);

$text = (string)$xml->child;

$text will be 'Hello World'

answered Nov 23 '12 at 20:33

Nicolay77

2,085
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3

Works for me because it doesn't put the tags in, thanks – Andrew Jan 26 '16 at 20:47

score 18 · Answer 3 · answered Sep 11 '10 at 13:11

18

You can use the asXML method as:

<?php

// string to SimpleXMLElement
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($string);

// make any changes.
....

// convert the SimpleXMLElement back to string.
$newString = $xml->asXML();
?>

answered Sep 11 '10 at 13:11

codaddict

445,704
82
492
529

score 17 · Answer 4 · answered Aug 16 '12 at 22:23

Actually asXML() converts the string into xml as it name says:

<id>5</id>

This will display normally on a web page but it will cause problems when you matching values with something else.

You may use strip_tags function to get real value of the field like:

$newString = strip_tags($xml->asXML());

PS: if you are working with integers or floating numbers, you need to convert it into integer with intval() or floatval().

$newNumber = intval(strip_tags($xml->asXML()));

score 9 · Answer 5 · edited Apr 18 '15 at 07:55

You can use ->child to get a child element named child.

This element will contain the text of the child element.

But if you try var_dump() on that variable, you will see it is not actually a PHP string.

The easiest way around this is to perform a strval(xml->child); That will convert it to an actual PHP string.

This is useful when debugging when looping your XML and using var_dump() to check the result.

So $s = strval($xml->child);.

paralaks · Answer 6 · 2016-09-15T04:00:35.510

Here is a function I wrote to solve this issue (assuming tag has no attributes). This function will keep HTML formatting in the node:

function getAsXMLContent($xmlElement)
{
  $content=$xmlElement->asXML();

  $end=strpos($content,'>');
  if ($end!==false)
  {
    $tag=substr($content, 1, $end-1);

    return str_replace(array('<'.$tag.'>', '</'.$tag.'>'), '', $content);
  }
  else
    return '';
}


$string = "<element><child>Hello World</child></element>";
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($string);

echo getAsXMLContent($xml->child); // prints Hello World

score 2 · Answer 7 · answered May 15 '19 at 07:05

2

Sometimes you can simply typecast:

// this is the value of my $xml
object(SimpleXMLElement)#10227 (1) {
  [0]=>
  string(2) "en"
}

$s = (string) $xml; // returns "en";

answered May 15 '19 at 07:05

Luca Reghellin

7,426
12
73
118

2

This is the kind of object you get for the description field of an RSS feed. It's counter-intuitive that it works, but it was the only solution here that gave me the string inside `$xmlitem->description`. Thanks. – Henrik Erlandsson Aug 08 '19 at 09:12

score 1 · Answer 8 · edited May 20 '20 at 13:55

1

Probably depending on the XML feed you may/may not need to use __toString(); I had to use the __toString() otherwise it is returning the string inside an SimpleXMLElement. Maybe I need to drill down the object further ...

edited May 20 '20 at 13:55

halfer

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17
99
186

answered Feb 24 '18 at 00:27

Keenan Stewart

594
6
9

SimpleXml to string

8 Answers8

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