Personal Computing and Development by Dag J. Nedrelid

PHP SimpleXML

First you define your XML document source

$xml = new SimpleXMLElement(file_get_contents('http://example.com/rss/'));

Then you choose what structure to get from the XML, in this example I want to loop through all the <item> tags under the first <channel>. Then I want to view the <title> of each item, as well as a download count from the ‘download’ namespace. The XML could look something like this:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″ ?>
<rss xmlns:download=”http://example.com/rss/downloadModule#” version=”2.0″>

<channel>
<item>
<title>The Title</title>
<download:count>12345</download:count>
</item>
<item>
<title>The Title 2</title>
<download:count>1234</download:count>
</item>
</channel>

SimpleXML works through arrays. Here I’m telling it to loop through the first <channel> by writing ‘channel[0]‘, and then the item collection within that channel. This small example illustrates how to handle both normal tags and namespaces.

foreach( $xml->channel[0]->item as $item ) {
// The download namespace
$download = $item->children('http://example.com/rss/downloadModule#');

// View item title
echo $item->title;

// The download count
echo $downloads->count;
}

I haven’t had any need for it yet, but to get the attributes within a tag you should only have to do something like this:

$attributes = $item->attributes();

// View attributes through names:
echo $attributes->attribute1;
echo $attributes->attribute2;

Tags: XML