parsing xml and read each element in php

Question

I have the following XML output from an API

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
<Response>
    <ReturnRow Output1="11" Output2="12" Output3="13" Output4="14" Output5="15" />
    <ReturnRow Output1="21" Output2="22" Output3="23" Output4="24" Output5="25" />
    <Messages>
        <Message Code="INFO" Msg="Your request is successful." Type="APP"/>
    </Messages>       
</Response>

I'm trying to parse the above xml using PHP, loop the child element ReturnRown and echo out the Output1, Output2 into an HTML table.

Here's my code currently:

$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->loadXML($test); //$test is holding the above XML
$node = $doc->getElementsByTagName( "ReturnRow" );
foreach ($node as $book) {
     var_dump($book);
}

But the above is not actually giving me the values of the Ouput1, Output2 etc.

What am I missing or doing wrong?

The result of my above PHP code:

object(DOMElement)#3 (18) { ["tagName"]=> string(9) "ReturnRow" ["schemaTypeInfo"]=> NULL        ["nodeName"]=> string(9) "ReturnRow" ["nodeValue"]=> string(0) "" ["nodeType"]=> int(1)     ["parentNode"]=> string(22) "(object value omitted)" ["childNodes"]=> string(22) "(object value omitted)" ["firstChild"]=> NULL ["lastChild"]=> NULL ["previousSibling"]=> string(22) "(object value omitted)" ["nextSibling"]=> string(22) "(object value omitted)" ["attributes"]=> string(22) "(object value omitted)" ["ownerDocument"]=> string(22) "(object value omitted)" ["namespaceURI"]=> NULL ["prefix"]=> string(0) "" ["localName"]=> string(9) "ReturnRow" ["baseURI"]=> string(20) "file:///W:/ischools/" ["textContent"]=> string(0) "" } object(DOMElement)#5 (18) { ["tagName"]=> string(9) "ReturnRow" ["schemaTypeInfo"]=> NULL ["nodeName"]=> string(9) "ReturnRow" ["nodeValue"]=> string(0) "" ["nodeType"]=> int(1) ["parentNode"]=> string(22) "(object value omitted)" ["childNodes"]=> string(22) "(object value omitted)" ["firstChild"]=> NULL ["lastChild"]=> NULL ["previousSibling"]=> string(22) "(object value omitted)" ["nextSibling"]=> string(22) "(object value omitted)" ["attributes"]=> string(22) "(object value omitted)" ["ownerDocument"]=> string(22) "(object value omitted)" ["namespaceURI"]=> NULL ["prefix"]=> string(0) "" ["localName"]=> string(9) "ReturnRow" ["baseURI"]=> string(20) "file:///W:/ischools/" ["textContent"]=> string(0) "" }

possible duplicate of [How to parse and process HTML with PHP?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3577641/how-to-parse-and-process-html-with-php) — PeeHaa, Aug 08 '12 at 15:39

complex857 · Accepted Answer · 2012-08-08T15:52:22.840

In your case, i would prefer to use simplexml because it could return all attributes of a node in an easily iterable format, and use xpath to find the nodes you are interested in:

$xml = '<'.'?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Response>
    <ReturnRow Output1="11" Output2="12" Output3="13" Output4="14" Output5="15" />
    <ReturnRow Output1="21" Output2="22" Output3="23" Output4="24" Output5="25" />
    <Messages>
        <Message Code="INFO" Msg="Your request is successful." Type="APP"/>
    </Messages>
</Response>
';

$doc = simplexml_load_string($xml);
$node = $doc->xpath('//ReturnRow');
foreach ($node as $book) {
    foreach ($book->attributes() as $name => $value) {
        var_dump((string)$name, (string)$value);
    }
}

If your input has always have these attributes you can use DOMNode's getAttribute() method in your original code's loop to get to the values:

foreach ($node as $book) {
    var_dump($book->getAttribute('Output1'), $book->getAttribute('Output2'));
}

Thanks for the help. First code blocks works and dump out the values. But second code block causes a php error. any ideas? — Vijay Vj, Aug 08 '12 at 16:03
I'm not sure why would it throw errors, here's a full demo that should work without erros: http://codepad.viper-7.com/tYNMzI — complex857, Aug 08 '12 at 16:08

parsing xml and read each element in php

1 Answers1