Is this the correct way to access a simplexml object's contents?

Question

  $test_string = '<a href="#">blah blah</a>';
  $test_obj = simplexml_load_string($test_string);
  fb((string)$test_obj[0]);

I thought I could just access the contents of the anchor tag by doing $test_obj[0]. I'm doing this to move away from using regular expressions to access individual html elements and properties in PHP. Is this cast to string necessary or is there a better way?

thanks!

Answer 1

If you are moving away from Regex to access DOM elements try:

PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser http://simplehtmldom.sourceforge.net/

I took me away from a whole world of pain I was suffering with Regex, then with SimpleXML and XPath. Hope this helps.