Richard Lynch wrote:
> On Mon, November 13, 2006 9:29 am, Jochem Maas wrote:
>> that sounds about right. my experience with SimpleXML is that every is
>> either
>> a string, an object, an array depending on how you are looking at it
>> and regardless of
>> the situation auto-casting can be relied on to NOT do what you
>> want/expect ...
>> the most problematic thing I found with simpleXML was the complete
>> lack of means to
>> inspect an objects structure/content using funcs like var_dump() [it
>> seems
>> lots of __toString() magic lays waste to any attempt to look inside
>> the object]
>>
>> from what I gather the described 'annoyance' is indicative of the
>> prescribed
>> SimpleXML behaviour.
>>
>> I personally believe that SimpleXML is too clever and/or intuitive for
>> it's own good
>> - or maybe I'm just incredibly stupid, either way I decided a while
>> back to stick to
>> using the DOM extension for anything XML related because I found it so
>> much easier to
>> use and understand.
>
> +1
>
> I couldn't figure *anything* out with SimpleXML because I could never
> actually "see" what my data was. I'd ask it what it was, and it would
> say it was an object, so I'd treat it like an object and it would
> bitch at me so I had to pretend the object was an array and then
> stumble down to the next node and start this infuriating process all
> over again.
>
> I sure hope somebody out there is getting something valuable out of
> it, though, as it's obvious somebody went to a lot of effort to make
> it do all those tricks.
The var_dump/print_r support was fixed a while ago. It's quite easy to
see what is in a SimpleXML object. The only time it gets a little bit
tricky is when your source is heavily namespaced. Then you need to
explicitly state which namespace to get things from. But, take for
example PHP's RSS feed at php.net/news.rss:
$xml = simplexml_load_file('news.rss');
print_r($xml);
The top of which gives you (with a couple of namespaced entries removed):
SimpleXMLElement Object
(
[channel] => SimpleXMLElement Object
(
[title] => PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor
[link] => http://www.php.net/
[description] => The PHP scripting language web site
)
[item] => Array
(
[0] => SimpleXMLElement Object
(
[title] => PHP 5.2.0 Released
[link] => http://www.php.net/releases/5_2_0.php
[description] => The PHP development team is proud
to announce the immediate release of PHP 5.2.0. This release is a major
improvement in the 5.X series, which includes a large number of new
features, bug fixes and security enhancements. Further details about
this release can be found in the release announcement 5.2.0, the full
list of changes is available in the ChangeLog PHP 5. All users of PHP,
especially those using earlier PHP 5 releases are advised to upgrade to
this release as soon as possible. This release also obsoletes the 5.1
branch of PHP. For users upgrading from PHP 5.0 and PHP 5.1 there is an
upgrading guide available here, detailing the changes between those
releases and PHP 5.2.0.
)
...
>From that I think it is quite obvious that a simple:
foreach(simplexml_load_file('http://www.php.net/news.rss')->item as $item) {
echo <<<EOB
<h1><a href="{$item->link}">{$item->title}</a><h1>
<p>{$item->description}</p>
EOB;
}
Gives you a very quick and simple way to put up a list of the items in
that feed. That's what SimpleXML is for. And this is what a lot of
people find extremely useful. If you want to fiddle with namespaces, it
does support it via the getNamespaces() and children(namespace) methods,
but then it starts to become rather non-simple.
-Rasmus
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