Comments on: Mangling XML as Text with PHP DOM

By: mkoenig

mkoenig — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 11:14:17 +0000

I wish i would have read this post about a week earlier.

By: Matthew Turland

Matthew Turland — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 23:41:50 +0000

1) http://us.php.net/manual/en/class.domnode.php#domnode.props.textcontent

2) http://svn.assembla.com/svn/php_domquery/trunk/DomQuery.php

By: AppSol

AppSol — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 20:16:15 +0000

Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a way with PHP DOM to get the text equivalent of any arbitrary node

Ummmh, Xpath?

Seriously PHPs XSLT support in 5 is great, you can even call PHP functions from within the XSLT.

By: David Sklar

David Sklar — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 15:18:13 +0000

(Ugh. Looks like the “code block” choice in the editor here doesn’t preserve newlines.)

By: David Sklar

David Sklar — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 15:17:27 +0000

I love regular expressions as much (more than?) the next guy, but it seems uncomfortably brittle to use them to “parse” XML. If XSLT is overkill for this sort of XML transformation, why not then instead use XPath to identify the nodes you want to change and a little bit of DOM manipulation to effect the change? E.g.:


$d = new DOMDocument($xml);
$d->loadXml($xml);
$x = new DOMXPath($d);

$replacements = array('//div[@class="section"]' => 'section',
                      '//code' => 'jstype');

foreach ($replacements as $query => $newName) {
    foreach ($x->query($query) as $oldNode) {
        $newNode = $oldNode->ownerDocument->createElement($newName);
        foreach ($oldNode->childNodes as $child) {
            $newNode->appendChild($child->cloneNode(true));
        }
        $oldNode->parentNode->replaceChild($newNode, $oldNode);
    }
}

By: hmm

hmm — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 13:56:04 +0000

I just want paste a small “review” about your article, which I found on other blog ( http://blog.wombert.de/post/43374548/sitepoint-blogs-mangling-xml-as-text-with-php-dom ).

“say that this article is the top contestant for the biggest fail of the year… he uses ereg functions (they always sucked, and will be gone in PHP6), parses and replaces XML by hand, has apparently never heard of XPath and most of all… XSL was designed to do all this, like… decades ago, but hey, it’s only 2008…”

I agree in 100% with this opinion.

By: fte

fte — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 13:27:20 +0000

What was the reason to do not use XSLT ?

By: Gabriel

Gabriel — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 12:12:40 +0000

Hi!

Seems to be the perfect use case for XSLT instead of PHP and DOM. Any reason why you chose PHP?

Gabriel

By: Marklar

Marklar — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 11:44:54 +0000

Are you some sort of idiot?

Have you ever heard of XSL? Are you even aware of the fact that ereg() is deprecated?

Seriously, WTF?

By: Nathan Reynolds

Nathan Reynolds — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 09:52:17 +0000

Should be able to use $xmltext = $xmldom->documentElement->saveXML($node);.

Now why that’s a document method rather than a node method, I’ve no idea.