searching xml files

screative

I have looked around the web a couple places and I have not found a solution to querying and sorting results from xml files. Basicly what I want to do is select the 'items' where 'parentnav' is greater than 0, then sort those records asc. Xpath seems like it is the way to go.. but I never could get it to do the query without an error, nor could I find out how to sort it. Please help?

This is myxml.php:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1" ?> 
<pages> 
    <item>   

        <parentnav>3</parentnav>   

        <filename>works.php5</filename>   

    </item> 
    <item>   

        <parentnav>2</parentnav>   

        <filename>statement.php5</filename>   

    </item>
	    <item>   

        <parentnav>1</parentnav>   

        <filename>index.php5</filename>   

    </item>  

</pages>

Here is the php code I have now:

$xml = simplexml_load_file("myxml.php");
foreach($xml->item as $item) {
    print $item->filename ."\n";
	print $item->parentnav ."\n";
}

sneakyimp

read this:
http://us2.php.net/manual/en/function.simplexml-load-file.php

your code is reading the xml into an OBJECT. as far as i know, objects don't offer any sorting functions. from what i read about the SimpleXMLElement class, it doesn't offer sorting at least...or filtering.

you should maybe loop through the object as you have in your code with the foreach loop and copy relevant info to a new array which you can sort using asort() or arsort() or so array_multisort() or uasort() or something.

note: this sort of thing might be difficult if your XML defines some kind of nested object....like if items contains more items which can can contain items. if items is just a list, it should be easy.

bradgrafelman

$xml = simplexml_load_file("myxml.php"); 
$array = array();
foreach($xml->item as $item) { 
    if($item->parentnav > 0)
        $array[($item->parentnav)] = $item->filename;
}
ksort($array);

$array will then be sorted by the 'parentnav' field ascending. Note that the parentnav field has to be a unique number, otherwise entries will be overwritten.