XML - Better way of doing this ?

[aspiers]

Hi,

The following script parses some XML to try and get the value of ID. Is there a better way of doing this ?

<?
$simple = "<QueryResult><Count>2428</Count><DispMax>1</DispMax><DispStart>0</DispStart><Id>10754179</Id>";
$simple .= "<TranslationSet></TranslationSet><TranslationStack><TermSet><Term>\"breasts\"</Term>";
$simple .= "<Field>All Fields</Field><Count>2428</Count><Explode>Y</Explode></TermSet></TranslationStack></QueryResult>";

$p = xml_parser_create();
xml_parse_into_struct($p,$simple,&$vals,&$index);
xml_parser_free($p);

while ( list ( $keys, $values ) = each ($index)) {
if ($keys == "ID") {
list ( $key ) = $values;

while ( list ( $key1, $value1 ) = each ($vals[$key])) {
if ($key1 == "value") $cutstring = $value1;
}
}
}

echo "cs = $cutstring";

[edsko]

The way you are describing is the event based XML parsing; maybe the easier way would be (in your case) to use the DOM. There actually is an interesting article on the PHP DOM on PHPBuilder.

The question whether or not this is the better way is a question that the experts have not yet worked out and probably never will 🙂

Ideal solution would be XPath where you could just refer to "QueryResult/ID". A look into PHP and XLST might tell you more about that -- however, I have no experience with that at all so I couldn't tell you.

Edsko