Combining two Xpaths into one loop?

Question

I\'m using xpath to grab information from a document, the only issue is I havn\'t been able to combine them into 1 for loop so the information displays correctly on the page. My

Answer 1

This depends a bit on what you're trying to achieve. You can combine two xpath expressions by using the Union operator (pipe |):

$unitName = $xpath->evaluate("
(
    //ILS_Unit[@FloorplanID='550584']/Unit/MITS:MarketingName
    |//ILS_Unit[@FloorplanID='550584']/Unit/MITS:Information/MITS:MarketRent
)
");

Which then would return all evaluated nodes in document order:

        1265.0000
C-304
1265.0000
C-308
1255.0000
C-204
1255.0000
C-208
1230.0000
C-102
1230.0000
C-103
    

Which is probably not what you're looking for. Instead you want to either evaluate over both results the same time, which can be achieved with a MultipleIterator:

$unitName  = $xpath->evaluate("//ILS_Unit[@FloorplanID='550584']/Unit/MITS:MarketingName");
$unitPrice = $xpath->evaluate("//ILS_Unit[@FloorplanID='550584']/Unit/MITS:Information/MITS:MarketRent");

$it = new MultipleIterator();
$it->attachIterator(new IteratorIterator($unitName));
$it->attachIterator(new IteratorIterator($unitPrice));

foreach($it as $value) {
    list($name, $price) = $value;
    echo " * ", $name->nodeValue, " ", $price->nodeValue, "\n";
}

Output:

 * C-304 1265.0000
 * C-308 1265.0000
 * C-204 1255.0000
 * C-208 1255.0000
 * C-102 1230.0000
 * C-103 1230.0000

This is probably more what you're looking for. Also for what you do, SimpleXMLElement might be more easy to use because it already allows to output nodes in string context.

Additionally there is another concept that directly maps shallow objects to an underlying XML document and it has been outlined here:

• Extracting data from HTML using PHP and xPath

It is quite an interesting concept. IIRC I wrote something similar like applying one xpath query onto all nodes of another one, but I don't find it right now.