I have this XML:
<root> <parent> <child id="childAtt"> <subChild id="subAtt">Value to retrieve</subChild> </child> </parent> </root> I am currently trying to retrieve the text value of subChild using this XPath:
$total = $xml->xpath("/*//child[@id='childAtt']/subChild[@id='subAtt']"); However, this returns the subChild attribute value and not the node's text value.
I want to know how to retrieve the text value of subChild with the id of subAtt.
You just need to access the first element and typecast it as a string:
$total = (string) $xml->xpath("/*//child[@id='childAtt']/subChild")[0]; var_dump($total); Output:
string(17) "Value to retrieve" You can also try to extract the text directly with your XPath query:
$total = (string) $xml->xpath("/*//child[@id='childAtt']/subChild/text()") Your query does select the element. Just to expand @Amal's answer, the result of your query is an array of all results that looks like this:
array(1) { [0] => class SimpleXMLElement#2 (2) { public $@attributes => array(1) { 'id' => string(6) "subAtt" } string(17) "Value to retrieve" } } In words: the first element is a SimpleXMLElement instance whose string value is the desired text.
A complete example:
$string = <<<XML <root> <parent> <child id="childAtt"> <subChild id="subAtt">Value to retrieve</subChild> </child> </parent> </root> XML; $xml = new SimpleXMLElement($string); $result = $xml->xpath("/*//child[@id='childAtt']/subChild[@id='subAtt']"); var_dump($result); print (string) $result[0] . "\n"; 