Get node content from xml file and transform it into php array?

Question

Hello,

I'm looking for solution to extract some node from large xml file (using xmlstarlet http://xmlstar.sourceforge.net/) and then parse this node to php array.

elements.xml

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<elements>
  <element id="1" par1="val1_1" par2="val1_2" par3="val1_3">
    <title>element 1 title</title>
    <description>element 1 description</description>
  </element>
  <element id="2" par1="val2_1" par2="val2_2" par3="val2_3">
    <title>element 2 title</title>
    <description>element 2 description</description>
  </element>
</elements>

To extract element tag with id="1" using xmlstarlet I'm executing this shell command...

xmlstarlet sel -t -c "/elements/element[id=1]" elements.xml

This shell command outputs something like this...

<element id="1" par1="val1_1" par2="val1_2" par3="val1_3">
  <title>element 1 title</title>
  <description>element 1 description</description>
</element>

How could I parse this shell output into php array?

Thank you.

---

I've found http://php.net/manual/en/function.simplexml-load-string.php pretty useful. This SimpleXML function will convert extracted piece of XML to SimpleXML object.

Answer 1

you could always take the new outputted xml and use simplexml like:

$data = '<element id="1" par1="val1_1" par2="val1_2" par3="val1_3">
<title>element 1 title</title>
<description>element 1 description</description>
</element>';


$xml = simplexml_load_string($data);
echo $xml->title; //access title
echo $element_ID = $xml->attributes()->id; //access elements attributes by name

and now $xml is the array you need