Maintaining line breaks or no line breaks within multispan XML in PHP

Question

I have a string like

<p begin="00:35:47.079" end="00:35:49.119" region="r8" style="s1">
    <span style="s2" tts:backgroundColor="black">Hello I am a fireman. Good morning</span>
    <br/>
    <span style="s2" tts:backgroundColor="black">Why do you </span>
    <span style="s9" tts:backgroundColor="black">insist on that?</span>
</p>

I am trying to output it like

Hello I am a fireman. Good morning
Why do you insist on that?

I've tried this, which ultimately is outputting it to a file.

$xmlObject = simplexml_load_string($delivery, 'SimpleXmlElement', LIBXML_NOCDATA);
$xmlArray = json_decode(json_encode((array) $xmlObject), TRUE);
foreach($xmlArray['body']['div']['p'] as $p_tag) {
    if (!is_string($p_tag['span'])) {
        $multiLine = '';
        foreach ($p_tag['span'] as $line) {

            if (is_string($line)) {
                    $multiLine .= $line . "\n";
            }
        }
     
        $p_tag['span'] = $multiLine;
    }
}

        foreach($toPrint as $line) {
        
        if (!isset($line['begin'])) {
            continue;
        }
        $endSpace = '';
        if (!$shrunk) {
            $endSpace = '   ';
        }
        fwrite($fileOpen,"\n\n" . $line['begin'] . ' --> ' . $line['end'] . $endSpace . "\n" . $line['content']);
    }

and then printing out $p_tag line for line, but it will of course produce

Hello I am a fireman. Good morning
Why do you 
insist on that?

From here, I've also tried

$value = $Dom->documentElement->nodeValue;
$lines = explode("\n", $value);
$lines = array_map('trim', $lines); // remove leading and trailing whitespace
$lines = array_filter($lines); // remove empty elements


foreach($lines as $line) {
    echo htmlentities($line);
}

But that produces something like

Hello I am a fireman.Good morningWhy do youinsist on that?

When I var_dump the $p_tag, it produces something like this

["span"]=>
array(3) {
[0]=>
string(34) "'Hello I am a fireman. Good morning"
[1]=>
string(28) "Why do you "

[2]=>
string(28) "insist on that?"
}
["br"]=>
array(0) {
}

So the break gets put out of order, so I can't rely on that when looking at the XML object. The spans are grouped, the breaks are in a separate location, so there's no way in that case to put the line breaks in the location that they were in the original string.

Answer 1

You can make use of DOMdocument, searching for paragraph tags and looping the nodes inside it.

$string='<p begin="00:35:47.079" end="00:35:49.119" region="r8" style="s1">
    <span style="s2" tts:backgroundColor="black">Hello I am a fireman. Good morning</span>
    <br/>
    <span style="s2" tts:backgroundColor="black">Why do you </span>
    <span style="s9" tts:backgroundColor="black">insist on that?</span>
</p>';
$result=[];

$doc= new DOMdocument();
$doc->loadHTML($string);

//get all paragraphs by <p>
$par_tag = $doc->getElementsByTagName('p');

//loop all found paragraphs
foreach($par_tag as $par){

//loop the childnodes inside the paragraph    
foreach($par->childNodes as $child){

    //get the nodename of the element
    $tag = $child->nodeName;

    //if it is <span>: get the text
    if($tag==='span')$result[]=$child->nodeValue;
    
    //if it is <br>, add a linefeed
    else if($tag==='br')$result[]="\n";
    }
    }
    
echo implode('',$result);