Don't understand the output in XML Entities and PHP SimpleXMLElement

Question

I use entities in XML and I don\'t understand my results.

I have an XML file wich calls an external entity, this is config.xml :

Answer 1

Yes, this does really look weird. However, you can not use var_dump or print_r on a SimpleXMLElement. These elements are with a lot of magic and the var_dump here is lying to you. I mean really lying, see:

var_dump($config->totalInstances->totalInstances);

Is giving NULL and no SimpleXMLElement at all.

In your specific case if you want to make use of the document as a SimpleXMLElement with expanded entities, then you can use the LIBXML_NOENT option (substitute entities):

$config = simplexml_load_file('config.xml', NULL, LIBXML_NOENT);

This does allow to iterate over and access the entities that are represented by the entity/ies. The var_dump then looks much better, too:

class SimpleXMLElement#4 (1) {
  public $totalInstances =>
  class SimpleXMLElement#3 (1) {
    public $nombre =>
    string(2) "45"
  }
}