Reading and manipulating XML data with PHP

Ange52

I've heard its possible, I've read a little bit of the documentation, but I still feel pretty in the dark. I want to take all of the nodes under the first child of the XML document and shuffle their order. Shouldn't be too difficult, right? I would love any pointers I can get, or even just referrals to similar tasks so that I can get a feel of how to approach this in PHP.

Thanks,
Ange52

rincewind456

It might be worth searching the site before asking!
Here
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and Here

Ange52

I'm sorry, I failed to mention the one tricky bit of the situation: the PHP page I'm working with currently gathers up text from a MySQL database, and the text is already formatted as XML. Usually the page just spits out the results from the database then another app is able to read it as XML all ready to go. Now I want to try to manipulate this XML a bit more right after I pull it up from the database before it is ready for the other app to read it, however.

This is where it gets tricky: I can't quite load in an external XML file that I can work with... instead, everything is just text based right now. After reading all the resources I can find, I can't find a way that would let me manipulate the text I'm getting back from the database as XML then print it out as I am doing currently.

I hope this is still possible! Thanks,
Ange52

Rodney_H_

SO, if I understand you then:

1) you have xml document(s) stored in your db
2) you want to reshuffle the order of the first set of child nodes as you query the db and produce a result-set

If so, this can be done using regular expressions...

You can search for the nodes and save them into an array and sort them however you like.

(IF I uderstand you correctly, that is... 😛 )

Ange52

yeah -- i think you have a good handle on what i'm trying to do. so an outline of the php page might look something like:
1) query the db, get the results already formatted as XML
2) take the XML string, search for the first child somehow, storing the first child of the branch and all of the sub-children in an array
3) shuffle the array
4) put it all back together as a string with XML formatting

is that the right general outline? if so, what advice can you give me on actually coding out the PHP of step 2?