How to get a specific node text using php DOM

Question

I am trying to get the value (text) of a specific node from an xml document using php DOM classes but I cannot do it right because I get the text content of that node merged with its descendants.

Let's suppose that I need to get the trees from this document:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<trees>
  LarchRedwoodChestnutBirch
  <trimmed>Larch</trimmed>
  <trimmed>Redwood</trimmed>
</trees>

And I get:

LarchRedwoodChestnutBirchLarchRedwood

You can see that I cannot remove the substring LarchRedwood made by the trimmed trees from the whole text because I would get only ChestnutBirch and it is not what I need.

Any suggest? (Thanx)

score 4 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 15 '11 at 10:40

I got it. This works:

function specificNodeValue($node, $implode = true) {
  $value = array();
  if ($node->childNodes) {
    for ($i = 0; $i < $node->childNodes->length; $i++) {
      if (!(@$node->childNodes->item($i)->tagName)) {
        $value[] = $node->childNodes->item($i)->nodeValue;
      }
    }
  }
  return (is_string($implode) ? implode($implode, $value) : ($implode === true ? implode($value) : $value));
}

A given node is like a root, if you get no tagName when you parse its child nodes then it is itself, so the value of that child node it is its own value.
Inside a bad formed xml document a node could have many pieces of value, put them all into an array to get the whole value of the node.
Use the function above to get needed node value without subnode values merged within.

Parameters are:
$node (required) must be a DOMElement object
$implode (optional) if you want to get a string (true by default) or an array (false) made up by many pieces of value. (Set a string instead of a boolean value if you wish to implode the array using a "glue" string).

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 13 '11 at 16:20

You can try this to remove the trimmed node

$doc = new DOMDocument('1.0', 'utf-8');
$doc->loadXML($xml);

$xpath = new DOMXpath($doc);
$trees = $doc->getElementsByTagName('trees')->item(0);
foreach ($xpath->query('/trees/*') as $node)
{
  $trees->removeChild($node);
}
echo $trees->textContent;
echo $trees->nodeValue;

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Sep 13 '11 at 16:15

0

Use $node->nodeValue to get a node's text content. If you use $node->textContent, you get all text from the current node and all child nodes.

answered Sep 13 '11 at 16:15

Marc B

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score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Sep 13 '11 at 16:22

Ideally, the XML should be:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<trees>
  <tree>Larch</tree>
  <tree>Redwood</tree>
  <tree>Chestnut</tree>
  <tree>Birch</tree>
</trees>

To split "LarchRedwoodChestnutBirch" into separate words (by capital letter), you'll need to use PHP's "PCRE" functions:

http://www.php.net/manual/en/book.pcre.php

'Hope that helps!

How to get a specific node text using php DOM

4 Answers4

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