Xpath accessing the value of an attribute within an XML tag

Question

I'm attempting to extract the date saved in the <PersonDetails> tag for some XML I am working with, example:

 <Record> <PersonDetails RecordDate="2017-03-31T00:00:00"> <FirstName>Joe</FirstName> <Surname>Blogs</Surname> <Status>Active</Status> </PersonDetails> </Record>

Currently I have been trying the following:

if (isset($XML->Record->xpath("//PersonDetails[@RecordDate]")[0])) { $theDate = $XML->Record->xpath("//PersonDetails[@RecordDate]")[0])->textContent; } else { $theDate = "no date"; }

My intention is to have $theDate = 2017-03-31T00:00:00

RomanPerekhrest · Accepted Answer · 2017-06-10 06:46:37Z

2

A valid XPath expression for selecting attribute node should look like below:

$theDate = $XML->xpath("//Record/PersonDetails/@RecordDate")[0]; echo $theDate; // 2017-03-31T00:00:00

answered Jun 10, 2017 at 6:46

RomanPerekhrest

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1 Comment

BernardV Over a year ago

Thank you Roman, I got this to work thanks to you. Just out of interest, I kept using this 'semi' xpath: $XML->Record->xpath("//PersonDetails[@RecordDate]")[0]) just changing it to: $XML->Record->xpath("//PersonDetails/@RecordDate")[0]) and it worked perfectly.

ThW · Accepted Answer · 2017-06-12 09:18:17Z

You're mixing SimpleXML and DOM here. Additionally the expression fetches a PersonDetails element that has a RecordDate attribute. [] are conditions.

SimpleXML

So to fetch attribute node you need to use //PersonDetails/@RecordDate. In SimpleXML this will create a SimpleXMLElement for a non existing element node that will return the attribute value if cast to a string. SimpleXMLElement::xpath() will always return an array so you need to cast the first element of that array into a string.

$theDate = (string)$XML->xpath("//PersonDetails/@RecordDate")[0];

DOM

$textContent is a property of DOM nodes. It contains the text content of all descendant nodes. But you don't need it in this case. If you use DOMXpath::evaluate(), the Xpath expression can return the string value directly.

$document = new DOMDocument(); $document->loadXml($xmlString); $xpath = new DOMXpath($document); $theDate = $xpath->evaluate('string(//PersonDetails/@RecordDate)');

The string typecast is moved into the Xpath expression.

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