SimpleXML Xpath - Get attribute value from an unknown host node

PHP
1

Given this xml:


<root>
  <event id="test1">
      <randomTag url="">

      </randomTag>
  </event>
  <event id="test2">
      <anotherTag url="">

      </anotherTag>
  </event>
  <event id="test2">
      <someTag url="">

      </someTag>
  </event>
</root>

Sample Xpath to use with PHP SimpleXML (doesn’t work)
//event[@id=“test1”]/@url

The first part of the xpath expression works fine. It locates the correct event node based on the supplied id tag. The part I’m having trouble with is then finding any attribute in the event tag that has an attribute of url. I’ve done some googling and can’t seem to find the right syntax to get the attribute text from an unknown host node.

In short this is what the xpath expression should do:
In a given event tag return all url attributes found in any of events decedents.

Any suggestions on how to accomplish this functionality?

Thanks.

2

You were nearly there. The broken XPath asks for the url attribute belonging to the event itself. To tell XPath to look through all descendant nodes for their url attributes, you could use something like the following.

//event[@id="test1"]/descendant::*/@url