CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpxmlparsingdom
Jane
Jane

Reputation: 987

Parsing XML with PHP

I don't usually have to do any backend stuff, but for this one project I have to parse XML using PHP so it's all kind of new and very complicated to me. I need to display the fourth tag on a page and I figured I would use getElementsByTagName but the trouble is the three previous tags are the same, so it looks something like this:

<Person fname="John" lname="Smith"/> 
<Person fname="Frank" lname="Jones"/> 
<Person fname="Mike" lname="Jackson"/> 
<Person fname="Jack" lname="Williams"/> 
<value no="50"/> 
<value no="60"/> 
<value no="70"/>

Here is what I would like to output in my HTML page using the first attribute in the fourth tag and the attribute in the second tag:

Mike: 60

Basically, is there any way I can request the value of the attribute in the fourth tag regardless of what the tag is or what comes before or after it?

Any help would be appreciated -- thanks!

Edit - I didn't write the XML, I request from a remote server.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 172

Answers (2)

impiix
impiix

Reputation: 46

My notes about XML:

Links: http://php.net/simplexml.examples-basic

And example:

$xml='<p4wappremium>
    <servermessage>
        <providerref sid="123"/>
        <useractioninfo
            msisdn="48790300200"
            tid="12123123"
            stid="123123"
            pid="345345"
            bid="1"
          />
    </servermessage>
</p4wappremium>';

$xml = simplexml_load_string($xml);

foreach ($xml->providerref[0]->attributes() as $name -> $value) {
    ${$name}=$value;
}

foreach ($xml->useractioninfo[0]->attributes() as $name -> $value) {
    ${$name}=$value;
}

Hope it will be useful for your case.

Upvotes: 2

Raffael
Raffael

Reputation: 20045

Well I would suggest you reorganize your "schema". Cause this looks pretty odd to me to associate tag-values by order, like you do.

why not 

<Person fname="Mike" lname="Jackson" value="60"/>

or

<Person fname="Mike" lname="Jackson">
<value no="60"/> 
</Person>

instead?

Actually the way you apply those tags doesn't seem to be useful or maybe even not valid XML. B/c what you try to parse isn't an xml-dom-tree but a mere list. so why not write a list-parser yourself?

And if you want to use the DOM-extension and getElementsByTagName() then according to the manual you will get a DOMNodeList-object which allows you to refer to the resulting nodes by an index!?

Upvotes: 2

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