PHP + XPath Query get Child Nodes and their values

Question

I have a XML file record.xml which looks like:

<record>
    <name>john</name>
    <gender>male</gender>
    <subject>mathematics, english, science</subject>
</record>
<record>
    <name>jamie</name>
    <gender>female</gender>
    <subject>mathematics, science</subject>
</record>
<record>
    <name>jack</name>
    <gender>male</gender>
    <subject>social-science, english</subject>
</record>

I want to write a xpath query which will return all the child nodeName of <record> and value of all these child nodes in an associative array.

For Ex.:

For above XML file Output array should be-

array{
     [0] => array{
                 [name] = 'john',
                 [gender] = 'male',
                 [subject] = 'mathematics, english, science' 
            }
     [1] => array{
                 [name] = 'jamie',
                 [gender] = 'female',
                 [subject] = 'mathematics, science' 
            }
     [2] => array{
                 [name] = 'jack',
                 [gender] = 'male',
                 [subject] = 'social-science, english' 
            }
}

Below is part of Code I written this return all the <record> child nodes values but not their node name.

    .......
    .......
    $xmldoc = new DOMDocument();
    $xmldoc->load('record.xml');
    $xpathvar = new Domxpath($xmldoc);
    $res = $xpathvar->query('//record');
    foreach($res as $data){
            //$data do not contain node values
           $arr[] = $data->textContent;
    }
    //process $arr to get required format
     .....
     .....

I just want a Xpath query which will return child node names along with their values.

apokryfos · Accepted Answer · 2016-06-22 16:20:02Z

6

Problem is a record as a node is just part of the node hierarchy. What you're getting is all records, however you also want to descend and get the data from the record's child nodes. A very case specific example is :

<?php     
$xmldoc = new DOMDocument();
$xmldoc->load('record.xml');
$xpathvar = new Domxpath($xmldoc);
$res = $xpathvar->query('//record');
foreach($res as $data){
    $narr = [];
    foreach ($data->childNodes as $cnode) {
        $narr[$cnode->nodeName] = $cnode->nodeValue;
    }
    $arr[] = $narr;

}    
print_r($arr);

Should output something like:

Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [name] => john
            [gender] => male
            [subject] => mathematics, english, science
        )

    [1] => Array
        (
            [name] => jamie
            [gender] => female
            [subject] => mathematics, science
        )

    [2] => Array
        (
            [name] => jack
            [gender] => male
            [subject] => social-science, english
        )

)

NOTE: This solution is very case specific and would probably break if you have additional nested hierarchies (which I recommend you do in order to store the multiple subjects).

answered Jun 22, 2016 at 16:20

apokryfos

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1 Comment

Ajay Over a year ago

well i think this will be good enough for me to proceed further. Thanks

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