PHP XML Parser - ignoring nested/child tags

Question

I've got a situation where I'm using an XML parser to extract data from a php://input.

The data being sent in looks like:-

<this>foo</this>
<that>bar></that>
<data><dong>zebras</dong><fong>monkeys</fong></data>

Now, the issue is that because the handler:-

      $xml_parser = xml_parser_create();

   xml_parser_set_option($xml_parser, XML_OPTION_CASE_FOLDING, false);
   xml_set_element_handler($xml_parser, "startTag", "endTag");
   xml_set_character_data_handler($xml_parser, "contents");

   $document = file_get_contents("php://input");       

   xml_parse($xml_parser, $document);

   xml_parser_free($xml_parser);

...is interpreting tags for me to decifer the contents to make it useful... It seems to be missing anything within i.e. I need to find out how i can get it to ignore the child/nested elements/tags and just bosh out the data whatever.

Any thoughts muchos help. I've not found much about this out there.

Answer 1

WideDonkey, have you considered using the DOM instead? You can easily do :

$dom = new DOMDocument();
$dom->loadXML(file_get_contents('php://input'));

$data = $dom->getElementsByTagName('data');
$data = $data[0]->asXML();

Answer 2

Comment on Evert's answer: DOMNodeElement doesn't have a method asXML(), $data = $data[0]->asXML(); will not work with PHP-DOM. And SimpleXMLElement::asXML() will return the whole element's xml, i.e. <data>...</data>
But you can modify the XML Element Structure Example to print the tags in your element handler functions when the counter is > 1

Answer 3

What I ended up doing was using SimpleXML to do:-

$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($input);

$whatIwant = $xml->bar->monkeys

You can go down as many levels as you want such as test

The $xml is the furthest out wrapper tag.

Answer 4

phpQuery gives you all the power of jQuery Selectors wrapped up in a PHP shell.

phpQuery::newDocumentFileXHTML('my-xhtml.html')->find('p');