Plain parsing

Parsing XML documents with eZ xml™ is simple, all you need to do is pass the XML document to the domTree() function. The DOM object tree will then be returned.

Below is the XML document used in this parser introduction.

<?xml version='1.0'?>
<doc>
  <article>
    <paragraph name='Introduction'>Paragraph contents</paragraph>
    <paragraph name='Story'>Story paragraph contents</paragraph>
  </article>
</doc>

The code snippet below shows how you can parse an XML document and create a DOM tree. The DOM tree is then used to manipulate the document.

// instantiate the XML parser
$xml = new eZXML();

$testDoc = "<?xml version='1.0'?>
<doc>
  <article>
    <paragraph name='Introduction'>Paragraph contents</paragraph>
    <paragraph name='Story'>Story paragraph contents</paragraph>
  </article>
</doc>";

// $dom now contains the DOM object tree, false is returned if parsing was
// unsuccessful
$dom =& $xml->domTree( $testDoc );

Finding nodes

To find special nodes in the document you can use the elementsByName() function. This will return an array of DOM nodes. The code snippet below shows how you can find all paragraphs in the XML document.

// $paragraphs is an array of paragraph DOM nodes
$paragraphs =& $dom->elementsByName( "paragraph" );

Fetching content

When you have all the nodes you need you can access the attributes and content of these items. All nodes have a name, this should in this example be paragraph as we only fetched nodes by that name. The function attributeValue() is used to fetch the value of an attribute on the current node. To fetch the contents of a node directly you can use the textContent() function. Note that textcontent only works if it's a plain text node. Normally you would have to check all the children of the node if you expect subnodes of mixed type.

foreach ( $paragraphs as $paragraph )
{
    // get the name of the item, should be paragraph
    print( "New " . $paragraph->name() );
    // print the value of the name attribute
    print( "Name: " . $paragraph->attributeValue( "name" ) );
    // get the text content of the DOM node
    print( "Content: " . $paragraph->textContent() );
}

This is the result of the above code:

New paragraph:
Name: Introduction
Content: Paragraph contents

New paragraph:
Name: Story
Content: Story paragraph contents