I am doing some geocoding with the google api and was wondering how do i cast the returned simplexml object? I tried the following but it does no cast the child objects.. ie.. i would like a multi dimensional array.
$url = "http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/xml?address=".$adr."
&sensor=false";
$result = simplexml_load_file($url);
$result = (array) $result;
You could make a JSON request rather than XML; it's recommended; unless your application requires it. Then use:
json_decode( $result, true );
I found very useful this function for converting Object to Array recursively:
http://forrst.com/posts/PHP_Recursive_Object_to_Array_good_for_handling-0ka
Adapted from the site above, to use it outside classes:
function object_to_array($obj) {
$arrObj = is_object($obj) ? get_object_vars($obj) : $obj;
foreach ($arrObj as $key => $val) {
$val = (is_array($val) || is_object($val)) ? object_to_array($val) : $val;
$arr[$key] = $val;
}
return $arr;
}
Turn the SimpleXMLElement object into json and decode the json string again into an associative array:
$array = json_decode(json_encode($result), 1);
The simple cast to array does not go more deep in there, that's why the trick via json_encode and json_decode is used.
json_decode or probably more realistic: some esoteric compile that inverts the seconds parameters meaning ;)