PHP Convert SimpleXML object to Array

In PHP, if you want to convert your xml data to array for looping and displaying purpose, it sometimes becomes tedious. If you already have a SimpleXML class and want to convert XML to Array without any notices, warnings and recursively preparing the array, here is the method that will do so without any modifications needed. This will work by pasting this in your class file, if you are not using object oriented approach, you will have to remove “public” and “$this->” from this function.

public function simpleXMLToArray(SimpleXMLElement $xml,$attributesKey=null,$childrenKey=null,$valueKey=null){

    if($childrenKey && !is_string($childrenKey)){$childrenKey = '@children';}
    if($attributesKey && !is_string($attributesKey)){$attributesKey = '@attributes';}
    if($valueKey && !is_string($valueKey)){$valueKey = '@values';}

    $return = array();
    $name = $xml->getName();
    $_value = trim((string)$xml);
    if(!strlen($_value)){$_value = null;};

    if($_value!==null){
        if($valueKey){$return[$valueKey] = $_value;}
        else{$return = $_value;}
    }

    $children = array();
    $first = true;
    foreach($xml->children() as $elementName => $child){
        $value = $this->simpleXMLToArray($child,$attributesKey, $childrenKey,$valueKey);
        if(isset($children[$elementName])){
            if(is_array($children[$elementName])){
                if($first){
                    $temp = $children[$elementName];
                    unset($children[$elementName]);
                    $children[$elementName][] = $temp;
                    $first=false;
                }
                $children[$elementName][] = $value;
            }else{
                $children[$elementName] = array($children[$elementName],$value);
            }
        }
        else{
            $children[$elementName] = $value;
        }
    }
    if($children){
        if($childrenKey){$return[$childrenKey] = $children;}
        else{$return = array_merge($return,$children);}
    }

    $attributes = array();
    foreach($xml->attributes() as $name=>$value){
        $attributes[$name] = trim($value);
    }
    if($attributes){
        if($attributesKey){$return[$attributesKey] = $attributes;}
        else{$return = array_merge($return, $attributes);}
    }

    return $return;
}

Hope this helps.

Feb 12, 2012

kalpesh

No Comments

Magento/PHP: Convert your XML Object to Array

While developing shipment tracking using SimpleXML in magento, I came accross the requirement where I have to get all the XML tags as keys and all the data inside XML tags as values in array. Means I wanted to convert XML to an Array where I can display all the information in some decorative format.

So here is how I converted XML to Array without any kind of hardcoding.

PHP class method to convert xml to array

public function convertXmlObjToArr($obj, &$arr){
            $children = $obj->children();
            $executed = false;
            foreach ($children as $elementName => $node){
                if($arr[$elementName]!=null){
                    if($arr[$elementName][0]!==null){
                        $i = count($arr[$elementName]);
                            $this->convertXmlObjToArr($node, $arr[$elementName][$i]);
                    }else{
                        $tmp = $arr[$elementName];
                        $arr[$elementName] = array();
                        $arr[$elementName][0] = $tmp;
                        $i = count($arr[$elementName]);
                            $this->convertXmlObjToArr($node, $arr[$elementName][$i]);
                    }
                }else{
                                $arr[$elementName] = array();
                                $this->convertXmlObjToArr($node, $arr[$elementName]);
                }
                $executed = true;
            }
            if(!$executed&&$children->getName()==""){
                $arr = (String)$obj;
            }
            return;
        }

Hope this helps!

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Magento/PHP: Convert your XML Object to Array

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