API	Package	Subpackage	Class	Reference	Last reviewed	Doc status
Home	Joomla.Framework	Utilities	JSimpleXML	JSimpleXML	Never	Work in Progress

SimpleXML implementation.

The XML Parser extension (expat) is required to use JSimpleXML. The class provides a pure PHP4 implementation of the PHP5 interface SimpleXML. As with PHP5’s SimpleXML it is what it says: simple.
Nevertheless, it is an easy way to deal with XML data, especially for read only access.

Because it’s not possible to use the PHP5 ArrayIterator interface with PHP4 there are some differences between this implementation and that of PHP5:

• The access to the root node has to be explicit in JSimpleXML, not implicit as with PHP5.
  Write $xml->document->node instead of $xml->node
• You cannot acces CDATA using array syntax. Use the method data() instead
• You cannot access attributes directly with array syntax. use attributes() to read them.
• Comments are ignored.
• Last and least, this is not as fast as PHP5 SimpleXML – it is pure PHP4.

Note: JSimpleXML cannot be used to access sophisticated XML doctypes using datatype ANY (e.g. XHTML). With a DOM implementation you can handle this.

• JSimpleXMLElement

<?xml version=""1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="yes"?>
<document>
  <node>
    <child gender="m">Tom Foo</child>
    <child gender="f">Tamara Bar</child>
  <node>
</document>

// read and write a document
$xml = new JSimpleXML;
$xml->loadFile('simple.xml');
echo $xml->toString();

Will return the XML source of ‘simple.xml’ as depicted above.

// access a given node's CDATA
echo 'Name:', $xml->root->node->child[0]->data();

// access attributes
$attr = $xml->root->node->child[1]->attributes();
echo 'Gender: ', ($attr['gender'] == 'f') ? 'female' : 'male';

Will output:

Name: Tom Foo
Gender: male

// access children
foreach( $xml->root->node->children() as $child ) {
    echo $child->data();
}

Will output:

Tom Foo
Tamara Bar