SimpleXML with CDATA

[joshwalsh]

Hi,

I'm an avid PHP professional, and active on many boards online. I've read this one for a long time, and am glad to finally jump in and join this community.

I'm having a heck of a problem parsing what I thought would be a simple XML document...

<RESULTS>
<TITLE> Name1 </TITLE>
<VALUE> Name1 Value </VALUE>
<TITLE> Name2 </TITLE>
<VALUE> Name2 Value </VALUE>
<TITLE> Name3 </TITLE>
<VALUE> Name3 Value </VALUE>
<TITLE> Name4 </TITLE>
<VALUE> Name4 Value </VALUE>
</RESULTS>

However, this got much more annoying when I discovered that the elements were actually encoded with CDATA.

<RESULTS>
<TITLE> ![CDATA[Name1]] </TITLE>
<VALUE> ![CDATA[Name1 Value]] </VALUE>
<TITLE> ![CDATA[Name2]] </TITLE>
<VALUE> ![CDATA[Name2 Value]] </VALUE>
<TITLE> ![CDATA[Name3]] </TITLE>
<VALUE> ![CDATA[Name3 Value]] </VALUE>
<TITLE> ![CDATA[Name4]] </TITLE>
<VALUE> ![CDATA[Name4 Value]] </VALUE>
</RESULTS>

Any suggestions on how to parse this with SimpleXML?

Josh

[Weedpacket]

If that's really what it looks like, then it's broken and needs to be fixed; CDATA sections are supposed to be marked as <![CDATA[ ... ]]> - note the <>.
Aside from that, reading it should be just the same as for the first code.

[joshwalsh]

You are correct, although I picked up the phone and requested they get rid of CDATA since there was no formatting issue, and they promptly did.

I got out easy!

[Weedpacket]

Ah, one of those "it seemed like a good idea at the time" moments. I've had those🙂