remove element from xml

Question

in my xml file i want to remove record element according to title My xml file is

  
    <         


        

Answer 1

From the question I understood you want to remove the <record> elements with a <title> child that contains a specific text. The solution is more verbose than it needs to be and $attrValue is suggesting the DOMText of the title element is an Attribute, which it isnt. But anyway, let's remove all this and use XPath:

$searchString = 'Title:4';

$doc = new DOMDocument;
$doc->preserveWhiteSpace = FALSE;
$doc->load('playlist.xml');

$xPath = new DOMXPath($doc);
$query = sprintf('//record[./title[contains(., "%s")]]', $searchString);
foreach($xPath->query($query) as $node) {
    $node->parentNode->removeChild($node);
}
$doc->formatOutput = TRUE;
echo $doc->saveXML();

The XPath says, find all record nodes, which have a child title with a text node containing the search string. Note that containing, does not mean is equal to, so if you would use "Title:" as $searchString, it would remove all movies but "The_Princess_And_The_Frog_HD". If you want to remove exact titles, change the XPath to

'//record[./title[text()="%s"]]'

Learn more about XPath at W3C but note that PHP supports XPath1.0 only.

Answer 2

You can only call removeChild() on the respective parent node. Since the $nodeToRemove is not a direct child of $thedocument (it is a descendant), you get the "not found" error.

if ($nodeToRemove != null) {
  $nodeToRemove->parentNode->removeChild($nodeToRemove);
}