Remove namespace from XML using PHP

Question

I have an XML document that looks like this:

Answer 1

The following PHP code automatically detects the default namespace specified in the XML file under the alias "default". No all xpath queries have to be updated to include the prefix default:

So if you want to read XML files rather they contain an default NS definition or they don't and you want to query all Something elements, you could use the following code:

$xml = simplexml_load_file($name);
$namespaces = $xml->getDocNamespaces();
if (isset($namespaces[''])) {
    $defaultNamespaceUrl = $namespaces[''];
    $xml->registerXPathNamespace('default', $defaultNamespaceUrl);
    $nsprefix = 'default:';
} else {
    $nsprefix = '';
}

$somethings = $xml->xpath('//'.$nsprefix.'Something');

echo count($somethings).' times found';