PHP get values from SimpleXMLElement array

Question

I have this:

  [1]=>
object(SimpleXMLElement)#6 (1) {
  ["@attributes"]=>
  array(14) {
    ["name"]=>
    string(5) "MySQL"
    ["acknowledged"]=>
    string(1) "1"
    ["comments"]=>
    string(1) "1"
    ["current_check_attempt"]=>
    string(1) "1"
    ["downtime"]=>
    string(1) "0"
    ["last_check"]=>
    string(19) "2010-05-01 17:57:00"
    ["markdown_filter"]=>
    string(1) "0"
    ["max_check_attempts"]=>
    string(1) "3"
    ["output"]=>
    string(42) "CRITICAL - Socket timeout after 10 seconds"
    ["perfdata_available"]=>
    string(1) "1"
    ["service_object_id"]=>
    string(3) "580"
    ["state"]=>
    string(8) "critical"
    ["state_duration"]=>
    string(6) "759439"
    ["unhandled"]=>
    string(1) "0"
  }
}

(I used var_dump($child) to generate that)

How do I get the 'name' attribute out of there as a string?

Here is my code:

$xml = simplexml_load_string($results);

foreach($xml->data->list as $child) {
var_dump($child);
  echo $child->getName() . ": " . $child->name . "<br />";
  }

Answer 1

With SimpleXML, you can get :

• sub-elements, using object notation : $element->subElement
• and attributes, using array notation : $element['attribute']

So, here, I'd say you'd have to use :

echo $child['name'];

As a reference, and for a couple of examples, see the Basic usage section of simplexml's manual.

Example #6 should be the interesting one, about attributes.

Answer 2

Kind of messy, but I used this successfully

foreach($xml->data->children() as $child) {
//var_dump($child);
    foreach ($child->attributes() as $a => $b) {
     echo $a . '=' . $b . '<br />';
    }
}

Not sure why, but the OpsView API returns a two-dimensional array instead of just having one value per XML node :(

echo $child['name'];

works and is much more elegant, thank you.

Answer 3

While you can do:

echo $child['name'];

to see the value, you should note that $child['name'] is an object, not a string. Echoing it casts it to a string, so it works in that situation. But if you're storing it somewhere, it's better to cast it to a string yourself:

$name = (string) $child['name'];