SimpleXML save tag content as variable - variables

Question

OK I've been working with tag attributes up to now, but what if I want to save the actual contents of a tag as a variable, how would I do that?
For instance, in the example below, how would I save 'John' to a variable?
<person>
<name>John</name>
</person>
Thanks!

Answer 1

You're talking about SimpleXML in PHP?
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement('<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?><person><name>John</name></person>');
$john = $xml->name ;
echo $john ;
The reason we use $xml->name in our example rather than $xml->person->name is that SimpleXML will assume the root element (worth keeping in mind :). In a real example the XML would have a different root element, with perhaps several <person> elements, which you then could get by array notation, as in ;
$james = $xml->person[4]->name ;
A more powerful way is to use Xpath which is worth looking into for better dealing with complex XML ;
$john = $xml->xpath ( 'person/name' ) ;

Answer 2

Using PHP, you can do it in this way:-
<?php
$xmlstr = <<<XML
<person>
<name>John</name>
</person>
XML;
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($xmlstr);
$name_person = $xml->name;
// If you are unsure about the node string, then it's best to write it as:-
$name_person = $xml->{'name'};
/**
* This above statement will take care if the node string contain characters not permitted under PHP's naming convention (e.g. the hyphen) can be accomplished by encapsulating the element name within braces and the apostrophe.
*/
?>
More info is available here.
Hope it helps.