XML: php only parsing first in a series of children

Question

I have an XML string that I'm trying to extract the names of the children tags. Each child tag is self-closing. I'm trying to use SimpleXMLElement

$xml_str = '1<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><parent><personal_data><child1 attr="sth /><child2 attr=sth2/></personal_data><personal_data><child1 attr="sth /><child2 attr=sth2/></personal_data</parent>';

$sxe = new SimpleXMLElement($xml);

//get the children from the parent
$sxe = $sxe->children();
echo $sxe;
$form_mappers = array();
foreach ($sxe->children() as $child){
    array_push($form_mappers, $child->getName());
}        

echo var_dump($form_mappers); //only children from the first parent

This only gets the children of the first aParent node. Why can't I get the child nodes of the second?

Answer 1

If you're trying to get all <child*> nodes, you need to iterate each <personal_data> also to get inside the inner level:

$form_mappers = array();
foreach ($sxe->children() as $personal_data){
    foreach($personal_data->children() as $child) {
        $form_mappers[] = $child->getName();
    }
}

Sample Output