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Need help getting values with simplexml

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duane....@gmail.com

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Nov 2, 2008, 1:50:54 PM11/2/08

I'm writing a routine that fetches XML and attempts to parse some
values from it.
A condensed entry node of the XML looks like this ..

<entry>
<title>Some title</title>
<author>
<name>Author</name>
</author>
<source:resource url="http://somesite.com?tid=123456"/>
</entry>

I am able to get the values for things like title and author->name
but I need to get the value of the attribute for source:resource,
namely 123456 in this case

What I have so far.. with the above assigned as $xmlstr ..

[code]

if ($xml = simplexml_load_string($xmlstr, NULL, LIBXML_NOEMPTYTAG))
{}else{
echo 'Something isn\'t right.'; exit();
}

foreach ($xml->entry as $entry) {
$title = $entry->title;
$name = $entry->author->name;
/*$tid = presumably it is somehow accessable with SimpleXMLElement-
>attributes
but the parser seems to dislike the colons in the tag*/
}

[/code]

I was hopeing LIBXML_NOEMPTYTAG would help, but doesn't seem to.

Any hints ?

"Álvaro G. Vicario"

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Nov 3, 2008, 10:30:45 AM11/3/08

duane....@gmail.com escribió:

> I'm writing a routine that fetches XML and attempts to parse some
> values from it.
> A condensed entry node of the XML looks like this ..
>
> <entry>
> <title>Some title</title>
> <author>
> <name>Author</name>
> </author>
> <source:resource url="http://somesite.com?tid=123456"/>
> </entry>
>
> I am able to get the values for things like title and author->name
> but I need to get the value of the attribute for source:resource,
> namely 123456 in this case

Tags with colons, like <source:resource>, use namespaces. Many XML
parsers have poor support for namespaces, or none at all. As far as I
know SimpleXML can handle namespaces but the documentation is not very
clear. I had to parse such XML not long ago and I couldn't manage to do
it with SimpleXML so I can't provide you with working code but I'll tell
you what I learnt in case it helps.

1) You need to have somewhere in your XML an attribute like this:

xmlns:source="some-unique-id"

I guess your full XML file has it. This prevents the "namespace error"
warning in simplexml_load_string().

2) Supposedly, you need to use the children() method to get elements
that belong to a namespace:

$children = $entry->children('source', TRUE);

3) Once you have the element, you need to fetch the URL as *attribute*.
This works for me when there aren't namespaces:

<foo bar="blah"> ---> $xml->foo['bar']