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SimpleXML – solution for XML manipulation in PHP

By admin | September 7, 2008

If you ever do get the need to manipulate (read/write) XML, you could try using the PHP DOM API, but it’s very difficult to use the DOM. An good extension-less way to access and manipulate XML instead is SimpleXML. It’s very easy to use compared to DOM and features a easy way to access attributes and tags in any XML document.

XML file (sample.xml)
<?xml version=”1.0″ ?>
<root><example>This is example number 1</example><example><tag>This is a tag.</tag></example></root>

Reading a XML file
<?php
$a = new SimpleXMLElement(file_get_contents(“sample.xml”));
echo $a->example[0];
?>

The example above will read the sample XML file above and will output the contents of the first <example> element.

Writing a XML file

<?php
$a = new SimpleXMLElement(‘<?xml version=”1.0″ ?><root></root>’);
for($i = 1; $i <= 9; $i++) {
$a->addChild(“element$i”,”Hello”);
}
echo $a->asXML();
?>

The above example will create the following XML file:

<?xml version=”1.0″?>
<root><element1>Hello</element1><element2>Hello</element2><element3>Hello</element3><element4>Hello</element4><element5>Hello</element5><element6>Hello</element6><element7>Hello</element7><element8>Hello</element8><element9>Hello</element9></root>

So as you can see, you can very easily manipulate XML with SimpleXML. Don’t forget to subscribe to Compdigitec Labs for more interesting articles!

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Topics: (X)HTML, PHP | No Comments »

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