PHP SimpleXML get innerXML

Question

I need to get the HTML contents of answer in this bit of XML:

<qa>
 <question>Who are you?</question>
 <answer>Who who, <strong>who who</strong>, <em>me</em></answer>
</qa>

So I want to get the string "Who who, <strong>who who</strong>, <em>me</em>".

If I have the answer as a SimpleXMLElement, I can call asXML() to get "<answer>Who who, <strong>who who</strong>, <em>me</em></answer>", but how to get the inner XML of an element without the element itself wrapped around it?

I'd prefer ways that don't involve string functions, but if that's the only way, so be it.

Answer 1

using regex you could do this

preg_match(’/<answer(.*)?>(.*)?<\/answer>/’, $xml, $match);
$result=$match[0];
print_r($result);

Answer 2

To the best of my knowledge, there is not built-in way to get that. I'd recommend trying SimpleDOM, which is a PHP class extending SimpleXMLElement that offers convenience methods for most of the common problems.

include 'SimpleDOM.php';

$qa = simpledom_load_string(
    '<qa>
       <question>Who are you?</question>
       <answer>Who who, <strong>who who</strong>, <em>me</em></answer>
    </qa>'
);
echo $qa->answer->innerXML();

Otherwise, I see two ways of doing that. The first would be to convert your SimpleXMLElement to a DOMNode then loop over its childNodes to build the XML. The other would be to call asXML() then use string functions to remove the root node. Attention though, asXML() may sometimes return markup that is actually outside of the node it was called from, such as XML prolog or Processing Instructions.

Answer 3

This works (although it seems really lame):

echo (string)$qa->answer;