PHP SimpleXML

By Dag, on December 30th, 2016

A quick article on PHP's SimpleXML.

SimpleXML provides a simple and practical way of reading and handling XML content. SimpleXML requires PHP5.

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;