Parsing XML using SimpleXML in PHP

Question

i have a xml structure of the following form to be parsed using PHP simplexml.

<books>

<book>
<title>XYZ</title>
<author> someone </author>
<images>
<image type="poster" url="<url>" size="cover" id="12345"/>
<image type="poster" url="<url>" size="thumb" id="12345"/>
</images>
</book>

<book>
<title>PQR</title>
<author> someoneelse </author>
<images>
<image type="poster" url="<url>" size="cover" id="67890"/>
<image type="poster" url="<url>" size="thumb" id="67890"/>
</images>
</book>

</books>

Suppose i want to print the title of the first book. I am able to do that using

$books = $xml->books; 
$book = $books->book[0]; //Get the first book
print $book->title; //This works

But,when i try to print all the image urls for this book it does not work. The code im using is:

$books = $xml->books; 
$book = $books->book[0]; //Get the first book
$images=$book->images;

foreach($images as $image) //This does not work
{
   print $image->url;
}

Any way to fix this problem ?

Thank You

cletus · Accepted Answer · 2009-12-22 03:23:31Z

3

This works for me:

foreach ($xml->book[0]->images->image as $image) {
  echo $image['url'] . "\n";
}

See SimpleXML Basic usage.

answered Dec 22, 2009 at 3:23

cletus

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Comments

nickf · Accepted Answer · 2009-12-22 02:39:06Z

2

The url is an attribute, not a child element. Try this:

print $image->attributes()->url;

Documentation here

answered Dec 22, 2009 at 2:39

nickf

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2 Comments

John Over a year ago

Thanks for the reply nick. But i seem to be having a strange problem here. print $images->image[0]->attributes()->url prints the url of the first image correctly,but again the below loop for printing the urls of all the images does not work...what could be wrong here ? foreach($images as $image) { print $image->attributes()->url; }

jmans Over a year ago

You also need to do foreach ($images->image as $image)

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