PHP retrieve xml node value with simplexml

Question

Possible Duplicate:
PHP SimpleXML get innerXML

I've seen others questions related to simplexml and node value but couldn't find an answer to my problem.

I have a PHP var which contains an xml document formed like that :

<div id="container">
<div id="header"></div>
<div id="main">
      ##CONTENTS## cd <strong>dscsdcsd</strong> sdcsc
  <div>my content here</div>
  <span>and there</span>
    </div>
<div id="footer"> </div>
</div>

I want to retrieve the node value. But with the following code, I also retrieve the tag :

$xml = simplexml_load_string($_POST['newsletter_body']);
$att = 'id';

  foreach ($xml->children() as $el) {
    if($el->attributes()->$att == 'main') {
      $body_content = $el->asXml();
    }
  }

Could someone tell me how to get only node value (without using xpath)?

To be clear, now I get :

<div id="main">
      ##CONTENTS## cd <strong>dscsdcsd</strong> sdcsc
      <div>my content here</div>
      <span>and there</span>
</div>

And I just want :

      ##CONTENTS## cd <strong>dscsdcsd</strong> sdcsc
      <div>my content here</div>
      <span>and there</span>

Many thanks

"node Value" is an ambiguous term. You are asking for innerXML whereas nodeValue usually referes to inner text without XML tags. — Frederic Bazin, Jun 11 '11 at 07:30
@lenzai > Yes, but, I don't understand why simplexml as no method to get innerXml with xml value inside. — simo, Jun 11 '11 at 09:06

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:26

As suggested by @Tomalak, this is a duplicate of Stackoverflow: PHP SimpleXML get innerXML and you cannot do better than suggested with simplexml API.

function simplexml_innerXML($xml)
{
    $content="";
    foreach($node->children() as $child)
        $content .= $child->asXml();
    return $content;
}

In your code, replace $body_content = $el->asXml(); with $body_content = simplexml_innerXML($el);

However, you could also switch to another API that ofers distinction between innerXML(what you are looking for) and outerXML (what you get for now). Microsoft Dom libary offers this distinction but unfortunately PHP DOM doesn't.

I found that PHP XMLReader API offers this distintion. See readInnerXML(). Though this API has quite a different approach to processing XML. Try it.

Finally, I would stress that XML is not meant to extract data as subtrees but rather as value. That's why you running into trouble finding the right API. It would be more 'standard' to store HTML subtree as a value (and escape all tags) rather than XML subtree. Also beware that some HTML synthax are not always XML compatible ( i.e. <br> vs ,<br/> ). Anyway in practice, you approach is definitely more convenient for editing the xml file.

Thanks, I will give a try to that but I will probably use simplexml ° the SimpleDOM external library mentioned in the other thread. readInnerXML() uses php 5.2 since simplexml uses only PHP 5. I need the app to be generic — simo, Jun 11 '11 at 12:44
I was suggesting their second option with custom iteration. see my update above. — Frederic Bazin, Jun 11 '11 at 12:47
I posted the solution at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1937056/php-simplexml-get-innerxml/6327025 also — Frederic Bazin, Jun 13 '11 at 05:46

PHP retrieve xml node value with simplexml

1 Answers1