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Answer 1

+3 A:

You can use XSL to do this - just match the inner patterns first.

Here is a good starting point for learning what you can do with XSL:

http://www.w3schools.com/xsl/

You can perform the xsl transformation server side or in the client (using js, activex or other).

If you still hate this idea of xsl you could look at the xml parsing built into PHP - google for SAX parser PHP- which is a callback implementation to build your custom parser, currently using libxml2.

Klathzazt 2008-11-29 02:50:39

Yeah I'm aware of XSL. I did a lot of it back in 2002/2003 and I found it really nasty. Does PHP allow XSL transforms with appropriate callbacks?

cletus 2008-11-29 05:41:37

Yes- you can pretty much do anything within PHP that you can do with plain old libxml2. The next answer has details for registering php functions for use within xsl

Klathzazt 2008-11-29 15:43:55

Answer 2

+2 A:

PHP's XSLTProcessor class (ext/xsl - PHP 5 includes the XSL extension by default and can be enabled by adding the argument --with-xsl[=DIR] to your configure line) is quite sophisticated and allows among other things the use of PHP functions within your XSL document by using the XSLTProcessor::registerPHPFunctions() method.

The following example is shamelessly pinched from the PHP manual page:

$xml = '<allusers>
 <user>
  <uid>bob</uid>
 </user>
 <user>
  <uid>joe</uid>
 </user>
</allusers>';
$xsl = '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" 
     xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
     xmlns:php="http://php.net/xsl"&gt;
<xsl:output method="html" encoding="utf-8" indent="yes"/>
 <xsl:template match="allusers">
  <html><body>
    <h2>Users</h2>
    <table>
    <xsl:for-each select="user">
      <tr><td>
        <xsl:value-of
             select="php:function(\'ucfirst\',string(uid))"/>
      </td></tr>
    </xsl:for-each>
    </table>
  </body></html>
 </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>';
$xmldoc = DOMDocument::loadXML($xml);
$xsldoc = DOMDocument::loadXML($xsl);

$proc = new XSLTProcessor();
$proc->registerPHPFunctions();
$proc->importStyleSheet($xsldoc);
echo $proc->transformToXML($xmldoc);

Stefan Gehrig 2008-11-29 10:19:44

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XML parsing and transformation in PHP?

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