PHP DOM: How to get child elements by tag name in an elegant manner?

Question

I\'m parsing some XML with PHP DOM extension in order to store the data in some other form. Quite unsurprisingly, when I parse an element I pretty often need to obtain all c

Answer 1

An elegant manner I can imagine would be using a FilterIterator that is suitable for the job. Exemplary one that is able to work on such a said DOMNodeList and (optionally) accepting a tagname to filter for as an exemplary DOMElementFilter from the Iterator Garden does:

$a = $doc->getElementsByTagName('a')->item(0);

$bs = new DOMElementFilter($a->childNodes, 'b');

foreach($bs as $b){
    echo $b->nodeValue . "\n";
}

This will give the results you're looking for:

1
2

You can find DOMElementFilter in the Development branch now. It's perhaps worth to allow * for any tagname as it's possible with getElementsByTagName("*") as well. But that's just some commentary.

Hier is a working usage example online: https://eval.in/57170