Remove empty tags from a XML with PHP

Question

Question

How can I remove empty xml tags in PHP?

Example:

 $value1 = \"2\";
 $value2 = \"4\";
 $value3 = \"\";

 xml = \'

        

Answer 1

The solution that worked with my production PHP SimpleXMLElement object code, by using Xpath, was:

/*
 * Remove empty (no children) and blank (no text) XML element nodes, but not an empty root element (/child::*).
 * This does not work recursively; meaning after empty child elements are removed, parents are not reexamined.
 */
foreach( $this->xml->xpath('/child::*//*[not(*) and not(text()[normalize-space()])]') as $emptyElement ) {
    unset( $emptyElement[0] );
}

Note that it is not required to use PHP DOM, DOMDocument, DOMXPath, or dom_import_simplexml().

//this is a recursively option

do {
    $removed = false;
    foreach( $this->xml->xpath('/child::*//*[not(*) and not(text()[normalize-space()])]') as $emptyElement ) {
        unset( $emptyElement[0] );
        $removed = true;
    }
} while ($removed) ;