SimpleXMLElement: get the exact positions of different tags into the same parent

Question

I have this XML (simplified):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<book>
    <section>
        <p>Example text</p>
        <p>Another text</p>
        <img l:href="imagehref">
        <p>Some other text</p>
    </section>
</book>

I would like to make a readable text from this, so I'm parsing it with SimpleXMLElement and get this:

object(SimpleXMLElement) {
  ["p"]=>
  array(3) {
    ...
  }
  ["image"]=>
  array(1) {
    [0]=>
    object(SimpleXMLElement) {
    }
  }
}

All tags are grouped by name, so i cannot determine where the picture is located into the text – just that it exists.

The question: is there any way to get the exact sequence of tags in <section>? Like this:

[0] => 'p',
[1] => 'p',
[2] => 'img',
[3] => 'p'

so that i could transform them into HTML in correct order?

Answer 1

You could just iterate over the child nodes of every <section> tag.

// Assumes your string is loaded, e.g.
// $xml = simplexml_load_string($xml_string);
foreach($xml->xpath('//section') as $section) {
    foreach($section->children() as $node) {
        echo $node->getName(), "\n";
    }
}

You can see that this outputs:

p
p
img
p