xml parsing

[Gert Mellak]

Hi, NG!

I've spent many hours trying to understand why the dom-functions in
php do this and that, but the following I can't understand:

My xml-file looks like:

<Data>
<Article>
<Number>3746</Number>
<Description>This is the article description</Description>
<Groups>
<Group1>Group1</Group1>
<Group2>Group2</Group2>
<Group3>Group3</Group3>
</Groups>
</Article>
</Data>

having the current node "Groups", I call

//-- snip
$childNodes = $curNode->child_nodes();
echo "Number of child-nodes: " . count($childNodes) . "<br>";
//-- /snip

The output is: "Number of child-nodes: 7"

When I echo the node_name() of each child-node, every second node is
called #text

Could anyone of you explain why php reacts like this? I would expect a
child-count of three and definitely no #text-nodes...

Thanks in advance,

Gert.

[Zurab Davitiani]

Gert Mellak wrote:

<Groups>
<Group1>Group1</Group1>
<Group2>Group2</Group2>
<Group3>Group3</Group3>
</Groups>
<snip>
$childNodes = $curNode->child_nodes();
echo "Number of child-nodes: " . count($childNodes) . "<br>";
//-- /snip

The output is: "Number of child-nodes: 7"

When I echo the node_name() of each child-node, every second node is
called #text

Could anyone of you explain why php reacts like this? I would expect a
child-count of three and definitely no #text-nodes...

The whitespace is counted as text nodes. If you had the whole thing on one
line without any whitespace, it should be as you were expecting. I don't
like DOM for many reasons, but that's another topic.

[Berislav Lopac]

Gert Mellak wrote:

Hi, NG!

I've spent many hours trying to understand why the dom-functions in
php do this and that, but the following I can't understand:

My xml-file looks like:

<Data>
<Article>
<Number>3746</Number>
<Description>This is the article description</Description>
<Groups>
<Group1>Group1</Group1>
<Group2>Group2</Group2>
<Group3>Group3</Group3>
</Groups>
</Article>
</Data>

having the current node "Groups", I call

//-- snip
$childNodes = $curNode->child_nodes();
echo "Number of child-nodes: " . count($childNodes) . "<br>";
//-- /snip

The output is: "Number of child-nodes: 7"

When I echo the node_name() of each child-node, every second node is
called #text

Could anyone of you explain why php reacts like this? I would expect a
child-count of three and definitely no #text-nodes...

The whitespace (i.e. the newline char) between e.g. </Group1> and <Group2>
is considered text.

Berislav

--
If the Internet is a Marx Brothers movie, and Web, e-mail, and IRC are
Groucho, Chico, and Harpo, then Usenet is Zeppo.

[Janwillem Borleffs]

Gert Mellak wrote:

Could anyone of you explain why php reacts like this? I would expect a
child-count of three and definitely no #text-nodes...

In addition to Berislav's reply;

You can stop this behaviour by using the DOMXML_LOAD_DONT_KEEP_BLANKS
constant as the second argument of the domxml_open_file() call.
JW