Searching XML items PHP XPath

Question

I have an XML document:

     <items>
     <item>
     <id>1</id>
     <title>Title ABC Defg</title>
     <author>Author Name</author>
     <description>Description text </description>
     </item>
     ...
     </items>

And i would like to do a serching and check title, author, description if contains a phrase

I dont know how to do it at once and order it by relevancy. But it is not such important as searching for "Word" and "word". I used the php code:

    <?php
    $xml=simplexml_load_file(file.xml); 
    $query=$_GET['query'];
    $nodes= $xml->xpath("//item[contains(title,'$query')]");

    $count = count($nodes);
    for ($i=1;$i<=$count;$i++){

    $nodes= $xml->xpath("//item[contains(title,'$query')][$i]"); 
    foreach($nodes as $node) {
    $title = $node->title;
    $desc= $node->description;
    $auth= $node->auth;
    $id= $node->id;
    echo "id: $id<br />title: $title<br />author: $auth<br />desc: $desc<p>&nbsp;</p>
    ?>

I know it searches only titles but the problem is that when i search for Word it cant find word and i would like to get both : word and Word

If you could also help me with "connecting" searching in author title and description and to order it somehow i would really appriciate.

EDIT:

I have manage to search in all tags (not only specified but for me it is ok)

so i have code like this:

    $query=strtolower(rawurldecode($_GET['s']));
    $nodes= $xml->xpath("//item[contains(translate(., 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ', 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'),'$query')]") // . - all i suppose

i also use kind of validation of $query

Answer 1

So you want to know, how to select all children of <items><item> elements that contain the text search for with xpath (I leave case sensitivity out, you find that on the linked answers). First of all, all item elements:

//items/item

You already have that. To only return those that contain some text, add the predicate:

//items/item[contains(., 'XYZ')]

If you only want to search within the <title> child element:

//items/item[contains(title, 'XYZ')]

This is basically what you have already, however you make your live needlessly hard: You don't need to do that twice, you can just iterate over the matches directly:

$nodes = $xml->xpath("//items/item[contains(title, 'XYZ')]");
foreach ($nodes as $node)
{
    foreach ($node as $name => $prop) {
        printf("%s: %s\n", $name, $prop);
    }
    echo "\n";
}

Output:

id: 3
title: Title XYZ
author: Author Name
description: Description text 

To learn about how to escape input to xpath (which is read-only, so this is not as dangerous as a SQL injection), consider the following example:

$query = 'XYZ';
$expression = sprintf("//item[contains(title,'%s')]", $query);
$nodes = $xml->xpath($expression);

It will create the following expression:

//item[contains(title,'XYZ')]

But what happens if there is some single quote in there? It will terminate the string and therefore create an error:

$query = 'd\'oh';

Will give:

Warning: SimpleXMLElement::xpath(): Invalid expression in ...

You can prevent this by doing something as outline here, specifically assigning the value to the document and comparing against it then:

$query = 'd\'oh';
$xml['query'] = $query;
$nodes = $xml->xpath("//item[contains(title, /*/@query)]");

---

Old: You ask multiple questions at once:

1. How to search with xpath case-insensitive
2. How to find out about relevancy (so to sort it by relevance)

Relevance is undefined. What could be relevant for one could be irrelevant for others, so it's hard to answer that part of your question without a specific definition on how relevancy could be metriced.

For case-insensitivity search, duplicate questions have been already linked, so you should be able to do that. Best first dulicate in my eyes:

• case insensitive xpath searching in php

But here as well it remains undefined what case, lower and upper, is. You have not specified a thing, so your question can not be really answered.

Also you don't really validate your input:

$query = $_GET['query'];
$nodes = $xml->xpath("//item[contains(title,'$query')]");

It's possible to inject xpath here with the GET parameter. Take care, otherwise you won't do any search at all.