Parsing XML using PHP

Question

I\'ve consistently had an issue with parsing XML with PHP and not really found \"the right way\" or at least a standardised way of parsing XML files.

Firstly i\'m tr

Answer 1

You can use SimpleXML as suggested by the other posters, but you need to use the children() and attributes() functions so you can deal with the different namespaces

Example (untested):

$feed = file_get_contents('http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/2.0/artist/beatles/images.rss');
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($feed);
foreach ($xml->channel->item as $item) {
    foreach ($item->children('http://search.yahoo.com/mrss' as $media_element) {
        var_dump($media_element);
    }
}

Alternatively, you can use XPath (again, untested):

$feed = file_get_contents('http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/2.0/artist/beatles/images.rss');
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($feed);
$xml->registerXPathNamespace('media', 'http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/2.0/artist/beatles/images.rss');
$images = $xml->xpath('/rss/channel/item/media:content@url');
var_dump($images);

Answer 2

You would want something like this:

'content' => $node->getElementsByTagNameNS('http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/', 'content')->item(0)->getAttribute('url');
'thumbnail' => $node->getElementsByTagNameNS('http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/', 'thumbnail')->item(0)->getAttribute('url');

I believe that will work, it's been a while since I've done anything like this.