PHP5: Iterating through a list of child nodes (equivalent of child_nodes())?

Question

All,

I have an XML document that looks something like this:

<root>
    <profile>
     <childA>
     <childB>
     <childC>
    <profile>
    <blah>
    <blah>
    <foo>
    <bar>
<root>

I'd like to be able to grab the 'profile' node, then iterate through it's children ('childA', 'childB', etc)

So far, my code looks like this:

$doc = new DomDocument();
$doc->loadXML(file_get_contents("php://input"));
$profile_node = $doc->getElementsByTagName("profile")->item(0);

So far, so good. $profile_node has what I want.

In PHP4, I guess you'd do something like this:

$childnodes = $profile_node->child_nodes();
foreach ($childnodes as $node) {
    // do something with this node
}

But, I can't find the equivalent of child_nodes() in PHP5.

Since I'm pretty much a noob regarding PHP, I'd really appreciate a code example, so I can see the exact syntax.

Many thanks in advance!

Cheers, Matt

Answer 1

According to the php manual, the DomNode class has a public $childNodes variable. You can access it directly:

foreach ($profile_node->childNodes as $node) {
    // do something with this node
}

Answer 2

If you only need to read, I would suggest using the simplexml package:

$xml = simplexml_load_file('php://input');
$childnodes = $xml->xpath("//profile/child::*");
foreach($childnodes as $node){
  // do something
}

The SimpleXML package and the DOM package are interchangeable: you can import the SimpleXML into DOM objects using dom_import_simplexml().