Json Encode or Serialize an XML

Question

I have some xml, this is a simple version of it.

  item one
  item two         


        

Answer 1

While it's theoretically possible to write a generic conversion from XML to PHP or JSON structures, it is very hard to capture all the subtleties that might be present - the distinction between child elements and attributes, text content alongside attributes (as you have here) or even alongside child elements, multiple child nodes with the same name, whether order of child elements and text nodes is important (e.g. in XHTML or DocBook), etc, etc.

If you have a specific format you need to produce, it will generally be much easier to use an API - like SimpleXML - to loop over the XML and produce the structure you need.

You don't specify the structure you want to achieve, but the general approach given your input would be to loop over each item, and either access known attributes, or loop over each attribute:

$sxml = simplexml_load_string( $xml );
$final_array = array();
foreach ( $sxml->items->item as $xml_item )
{
    $formatted_item = array();

    // Text content of item
    $formatted_item['content'] = (string)$xml_item;

    // Specifically get 'abc' attribute
    $formatted_item['abc'] = (string)$xml_item['abc'];
    // Maybe one of the attributes is an integer
    $formatted_item['foo_id'] = (int)$xml_item['foo_id'];

    // Or maybe you want to loop over lots of possible attributes
    foreach ( $xml_item->attributes() as $attr_name => $attr_value )
    {
         $formatted_item['attrib:' . $attr_name] = (string)$attr_value;
    }

    // Add it to a final list
    $final_array[] = $formatted_item;
    // Or maybe you want that array to be keyed on one of the attributes
    $final_array[ (string)$xml_item['key'] ] = $formatted_item;
}