SimpleXML and parsing namespaced attribute

rp — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 19:12:01 +0000

SimpleXML is really good, this is especially more from the heart as its coming from someone who spent a decent amount of time using DOM API to parse xml in Java, though XPath was mostly a saviour. I usually get stuck when I there is an edge case or parsing some data format that I haven’t had to use. Recently I had to parse an XML feed which contained some attributes link this:

Some sample text

Trying to access is using the following code didnt work for me:

$attributes = $xml->a->attributes('foo');
echo $attributes['param'];

However as mentioned in the manual I needed to explicitly specify that the attribute is prefixed using the second argument. The default value for the second argument is false.

$attributes = $xml->a->attributes('foo', true);
echo $attributes['param'];

I spent a while trying to figure this out, hope this saves you some time. Btw simpleXML is awesome.

Connecting the dots... » namespaced

SimpleXML and parsing namespaced attribute