PHP: How to handle <![CDATA[ with SimpleXMLElement?

Question

I noticed that when using SimpleXMLElement on a document that contains those CDATA tags, the content is always NULL. How do I fix this?

Also, sorry for spamming about XML here. I have been trying to get an XML based script to work for several hours now...

<content><![CDATA[Hello, world!]]></content>

I tried the first hit on Google if you search for "SimpleXMLElement cdata", but that didn't work.

Answer 1

You're probably not accessing it correctly. You can output it directly or cast it as a string. (in this example, the casting is superfluous, as echo automatically does it anyway)

$content = simplexml_load_string('<content><![CDATA[Hello, world!]]></content>');
echo (string) $content;

$foo = simplexml_load_string('<foo><content><![CDATA[Hello, world!]]></content></foo>');
echo (string) $foo->content;

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You might have better luck with LIBXML_NOCDATA:

$content = simplexml_load_string('<content><![CDATA[Hello, world!]]></content>', null, LIBXML_NOCDATA);