Is there any function that makes string from PHP SimpleXMLElement?
- 4What kind of string do you want?Shamim Hafiz - MSFT– Shamim Hafiz - MSFT2010-09-11 12:18:30 +00:00Commented Sep 11, 2010 at 12:18
Add a comment |
8 Answers
You can use the SimpleXMLElement::asXML() method to accomplish this:
$string = "<element><child>Hello World</child></element>"; $xml = new SimpleXMLElement($string); // The entire XML tree as a string: // "<element><child>Hello World</child></element>" $xml->asXML(); // Just the child node as a string: // "<child>Hello World</child>" $xml->child->asXML(); 4 Comments
Luke Snowden
$string = $xml->child->__toString();
zloctb
htmlspecialchars( $xml->asXML() ) ?
Andrew
but yo are left with the tags, what if you don't want the tags? other answers solve this problem
HippoDuck
Don't use @LukeSnowden's method as this isn't supposed to be called directly. The actual correct answer is Nicolay77's answer which uses casting.
You can use casting:
<?php $string = "<element><child>Hello World</child></element>"; $xml = new SimpleXMLElement($string); $text = (string)$xml->child; $text will be 'Hello World'
1 Comment
Andrew
Works for me because it doesn't put the tags in, thanks
You can use the asXML method as:
<?php // string to SimpleXMLElement $xml = new SimpleXMLElement($string); // make any changes. .... // convert the SimpleXMLElement back to string. $newString = $xml->asXML(); ?> 
Comments
Actually asXML() converts the string into xml as it name says:
<id>5</id> This will display normally on a web page but it will cause problems when you matching values with something else.
You may use strip_tags function to get real value of the field like:
$newString = strip_tags($xml->asXML()); PS: if you are working with integers or floating numbers, you need to convert it into integer with intval() or floatval().
$newNumber = intval(strip_tags($xml->asXML())); 
Comments
You can use ->child to get a child element named child.
This element will contain the text of the child element.
But if you try var_dump() on that variable, you will see it is not actually a PHP string.
The easiest way around this is to perform a strval(xml->child); That will convert it to an actual PHP string.
This is useful when debugging when looping your XML and using var_dump() to check the result.
So $s = strval($xml->child);.
Comments
Here is a function I wrote to solve this issue (assuming tag has no attributes). This function will keep HTML formatting in the node:
function getAsXMLContent($xmlElement) { $content=$xmlElement->asXML(); $end=strpos($content,'>'); if ($end!==false) { $tag=substr($content, 1, $end-1); return str_replace(array('<'.$tag.'>', '</'.$tag.'>'), '', $content); } else return ''; } $string = "<element><child>Hello World</child></element>"; $xml = new SimpleXMLElement($string); echo getAsXMLContent($xml->child); // prints Hello World 
Comments
Sometimes you can simply typecast:
// this is the value of my $xml object(SimpleXMLElement)#10227 (1) { [0]=> string(2) "en" } $s = (string) $xml; // returns "en"; 
1 Comment
Henrik Erlandsson
This is the kind of object you get for the description field of an RSS feed. It's counter-intuitive that it works, but it was the only solution here that gave me the string inside
$xmlitem->description. Thanks.Probably depending on the XML feed you may/may not need to use __toString(); I had to use the __toString() otherwise it is returning the string inside an SimpleXMLElement. Maybe I need to drill down the object further ...
