XML Obtaining Namespaced node values

Question

I have this xml fragment:

<ModelList>
               <ProductModel>
                  <CategoryCode>06</CategoryCode>
                  <Definition>
                     <ListProperties xmlns:a="http://schemas.microsoft.com/2003/10/Serialization/Arrays">
                        <a:KeyValueOfstringArrayOfstringty7Ep6D1>
                           <a:Key>Couleur principale</a:Key>
                           <a:Value>
                              <a:string>Blanc</a:string>
                              <a:string>Noir</a:string>
                              <a:string>Gris</a:string>
                              <a:string>Inox</a:string>
                              <a:string>Rose</a:string>

That I am attempting to parse (with simplexml) with this:

$xml->registerXPathNamespace('a', 'http://schemas.microsoft.com/2003/10/Serialization/Arrays');

        $x = $xml->xpath('//a:KeyValueOfstringArrayOfstringty7Ep6D1');
        //var_dump($x);


        foreach($x as $k => $model) {
            $key = (string)$model->Key;
            var_dump($model->Key);
        }

That var dump currently returns a whole bunch of

object(SimpleXMLElement)[7823]

Which appears to contain the a:Value block. So how do I get the value of the node, not the blasted object tree?

And people think xml is easily parsed.

Answer 1

Sounds like you problem is more with SimpleXML as with XML itself. You might want to try DOM.

You can casts results in XPath itself, so the expression will return a scalar value directly.

$dom = new DOMDocument();
$dom->loadXml($xml);
$xpath = new DOMXPath($dom);
$xpath->registerNamespace('a', 'http://schemas.microsoft.com/2003/10/Serialization/Arrays');

$items = $xpath->evaluate('//a:KeyValueOfstringArrayOfstringty7Ep6D1');

foreach ($items as $item) {
  $key = $xpath->evaluate('string(a:Key)', $item);
  var_dump($key);
}

Output:

string(18) "Couleur principale"