I'm trying to modify an XML document which contains some node that I can identify by name. For example, I might want to modify the <abc>some text</abc> node in a document (which I can identify by the tag name abc)
The problem I'm facing currently is that I don't know the exact structure of this document. I don't know what the root element is called and I don't know which children might contain this <abc> node.
I tried using SimpleXML<...> but this does not allow me to read arbitrary element children:
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($xmlString);
foreach ($xml->children() as $child) {
// code here doesnt execute
}
I'm considering building my own XML parser which would have this simple functionality, but I cannot believe that simply iterating over all child nodes of a node (eventually recursively) is not something that is supported by PHP. Hopefully someone can tell me what I'm missing. Thanks!
Use DOMDocument
$dom = new DOMDocument();
@$dom->loadXML($xmlString);
foreach($dom->getElementsByTagName('item') as $item) {
if ($item->hasChildNodes()) {
foreach($item->childNodes as $i) {
YOUR CODE HERE
}
}
}
I found the solution moments after posting, after being stuck on it for a while..
SimpleXML<...> does not have these features, but the DOMDocument and associated classes do;
$dom = new DOMDocument();
$dom->loadXml($xmlString);
foreach($dom->childNodes as $child) {
if ($child->nodeName == "abc") {
$child->textContent = "modified text content";
}
}
Documentation for future reference, here: http://php.net/manual/en/book.dom.php
Thanks for your help.