“At sign” @ in SimpleXML object?

Question

This is the output of print_r() run on a typical SimpleXMLElement object:

SimpleXMLElement Object
(
    [@attributes] => Array
        (

            


        

Answer 1

Sorry, can't comment as a guest but for anyone else who ends up here like I did... I am creating my own Joomla form fields and Joomla creates a very 'interesting' object of all sorts of things. Now, I didn't want to become a SimpleXML expert, all I wanted was the original label text which was squirrelled away in @attributes.

After a bit of "hmmm, I wonder if this works?"™ I found this is the easiest way of accessing these values:

var_dump($simpleXMLObject);

/* Result */
object(SimpleXMLElement)
  public '@attributes' => 
    array (size=3)
      'name' => string 'awesome'
      'label' => string 'Awesome Label'
      'type' => string 'typeOfAwesome'

echo $simpleXMLObject->attributes()->label; // Awesome Label

$simpleXMLObject->attributes()->label = 'Different Day, Different Awesome';
echo $simpleXMLObject->attributes()->label; // Different Day, Different Awesome 

They were not lying. It really is simple.