This function is a quick and dirty solution to parsing simple XML. It takes some XML code and a tag name and returns an array of the contents of all the ocurrences of that tag in the XML code. This does not offer a solution to all XML parsing problems, for that try PHP's XML parser functions, but it does provide a quick way to split data out of simple XML schemas.
Imagine a simple piece of XML as follows, passed to your PHP code as $xml:
<continent>
<name>Europe</name>
<country>UK</country>
<country>France</country>
<country>Spain</country>
</continent>
<continent>
<name>South America</name>
<country>Brazil</country>
<country>Guyana</country>
<country>Argentina</country>
</continent>
You can use the function at the bottom of this page to extract the details as follows:
#split up the continents and work through them one by one
$continent_array = get_tag_contents($xml,"continent");
print_r($continent_array);
foreach ($continent_array as $continent){
#get the continent name
$name_array = get_tag_contents($continent,"name");
$name = $name_array[0];
print_r($name);
#get the country names
$country_array = get_tag_contents($continent,"country");
print_r($country_array);
}
And here is the function itself.
#function to return an array of the stuff between <tag> and </tag>
#for each occurence of <tag> for XML parsing.
#copyright (c)John W. List 2002-2003 http://www.technotoad.com
/*
This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public
License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either
version 2.1 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU
Lesser General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public
License along with this library; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA
*/
function get_tag_contents($xmlcode,$tag) {
$i=0;
$offset=0;
$xmlcode = trim($xmlcode);
do{ #Step through each ocurrence of <$tag>...</$tag> in the XML
#find the next start tag
$start_tag=strpos ($xmlcode,"<".$tag.">",$offset);
$offset = $start_tag;
#find the closing tag for the start tag you just found
$end_tag=strpos ($xmlcode,"</".$tag.">",$offset);
$offset = $end_tag;
#split off <$tag>... as a string, leaving the </$tag>
$our_tag = substr ($xmlcode,$start_tag,($end_tag-$start_tag));
$start_tag_length = strlen("<".$tag.">");
if (substr($our_tag,0,$start_tag_length)=="<".$tag.">"){
#strip off stray start tags from the beginning
$our_tag = substr ($our_tag,$start_tag_length);
}
$array_of_tags[$i] =$our_tag;
$i++;
}while(!(strpos($xmlcode,"<".$tag.">",$offset)===false));
return $array_of_tags;
}
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© copyright John W. List 1998 - 2007