How do I loop through a SimpleXML object in PHP

Question

I have a simpleXml object and want to read the data from the object , I am new to PHP and dont quite know how to do this. The object details are as follows.

I need to read [description] and [hours]. Thankyou.

SimpleXMLElement Object (
    [@attributes] => Array (
        [type] => array
    )
    [time-entry] => Array (
        [0] => SimpleXMLElement Object (
            [date] => 2010-01-26
            [description] => TCDM1 data management: sort & upload
            [hours] => 1.0
            [id] => 21753865
            [person-id] => 350501
            [project-id] => 4287373
            [todo-item-id] => SimpleXMLElement Object (
                [@attributes] => Array (
                    [type] => integer
                    [nil] => true
                )
            )
        )
        [1] => SimpleXMLElement Object (
            [date] => 2010-01-27
            [description] => PDCH1: HTML
            [hours] => 0.25
            [id] => 21782012
            [person-id] => 1828493
            [project-id] => 4249185
            [todo-item-id] => SimpleXMLElement Object (
                [@attributes] => Array (
                    [type] => integer
                    [nil] => true
                )
            )
)   )   )

Please help me. I tries a lot of stuff , but not getting the syntax right.

Answer 1

It's really hard to read the above, if you could give us a screen shot or give line spacing and indents, that would be a bit better If you have an object

$xml that is a simplexml object, you can access elements like

$xml->element.

It looks like is an element of time entry, in which case you would loop through like this:

foreach( $xml->{'time-entry'} as $time_entry ) {
    echo $time_entry->description . "<br />\n";
}

Answer 2

If the object that you print_r-ed in the question is in $element then the following will loop over the two time-entry elements while printing out their respective description and hours values.

foreach ($element->{'time-entry'} as $entry) {
    $description = (string) $entry->description;
    $hours       = (string) $entry->hours;
    printf("Description: %s\nHours: %s\n\n", $description, $hours);
}

Outputs something like:

Description: TCDM1 data management: sort & upload NFP SubProducers list
Hours: 1.0

Description: PDCH1: HTML
Hours: 0.25

Note that the time-entry element name has to be wrapped in curly braces¹ as a string since otherwise $element->time-entry would try to read the time element and subtract the value of a constant called entry which is obviously not what we want. Also, the description and hours values are cast² to strings (they would otherwise be objects of type SimpleXMLElement).

^{1. See variable variables 2. See type casting}