Disappearing attributes in PHP SimpleXML Object?

Question

I need to return a SimpleXML object converted as a JSON object to work with it in JavaScript. The problem is that there are no attributes on any object with a value.

As an example:

<customer editable="true" maxChars="9" valueType="numeric">69236</customer>

becomes in the SimpleXML object:

"customer":"69236"

Where is the @attributes object?

Answer 1

This has driven me crazy on several occasions. When SimpleXML encounters a node that only has a text value, it drops all the attributes. My workaround has been to modify the XML prior to parsing with SimpleXML. With a bit of regular expressions, you can create a child node that contains the actual text value. For example, in your situation you can change the XML to:

<customer editable="true" maxChars="9" valueType="numeric"><value>69236<value></customer>

Some example code assuming that your XML string was in $str:

$str = preg_replace('/<customer ([^>]*)>([^<>]*)<\/customer>/i', '<customer $1><value>$2</value></customer>', $str);
$xml = @simplexml_load_string($str);

That would preserve the attributes and nest the text value in a child node.

Answer 2

I realize this is an old post, but in case it proves useful. The below extends @ryanmcdonnell's solution to work on any tags instead of a hard-coded tag. Hopefully it helps someone.

$str = preg_replace('/<([^ ]+) ([^>]*)>([^<>]*)<\/\\1>/i', '<$1 $2><value>$3</value></$1>', $result);

The main different is that it replaces /<customer with /<([^ ]+), and then </customer> with </\\1>

which tells it to match that part of the search against the first element in the pattern.

Then it just adjusts the placeholders ($1,$2,$3) to account for the fact that there are three sub-matches now instead of two.