XXII. DOM XML functions

Warning

This module is EXPERIMENTAL. That means, that the behaviour of these functions, these function names, in concreto ANYTHING documented here can change in a future release of PHP WITHOUT NOTICE. Be warned, and use this module at your own risk.

This documentation is not finished yet. Don't start to translate it or use it as a programming reference (steinm@php.net).

These functions are only available if PHP was configured with --with-dom=[DIR], using the GNOME xml library. You will need at least libxml-2.2.7 These functions have been added in PHP 4.

The extension allows you to operate on an XML document with the DOM API. It also provides a function xmltree() to turn the complete XML document into a tree of PHP objects. Currently this tree should be considered read-only - you can modify it but this would not make any sense since dumpmem() cannot be applied to it. Therefore, if you want to read an XML file and write a modified version use the add_node(), set_attribute(), etc. and finally dumpmem() functions.

This module defines the following constants:

Table 1. XML constants

Constant	Value	Description
XML_ELEMENT_NODE	1	Node is an element
XML_ATTRIBUTE_NODE	2	Node is an attribute
XML_TEXT_NODE	3	Node is a piece of text
XML_CDATA_SECTION_NODE	4
XML_ENTITY_REF_NODE	5
XML_ENTITY_NODE	6	Node is an entity like
XML_PI_NODE	7	Node is a processing instruction
XML_COMMENT_NODE	8	Node is a comment
XML_DOCUMENT_NODE	9	Node is a document
XML_DOCUMENT_TYPE_NODE	10
XML_DOCUMENT_FRAG_NODE	11
XML_NOTATION_NODE	12
XML_GLOBAL_NAMESPACE	1
XML_LOCAL_NAMESPACE	2

Each function in this extension can be used in two ways. In a non-object oriented way by passing the object to apply the function to as a first argument, or in an object oriented way by calling the function as a method of an object. This documentation describes the non-object oriented functions, though you get the object methods by skipping the prefix "domxml_".

This module defines a number of classes, which are listed — including their properties and method — in the following table.

Table 2. DomDocument class (methods)

Method name	Function name	Description
root	domxml_root()
children	domxml_children()
add_root	domxml_add_root()
dtd	domxml_intdtd()
dumpmem	domxml()
xpath_init	xpath_init
xpath_new_context	xpath_new_context
xptr_new_context	xptr_new_context

Table 3. DomDocument class (attributes)

Name	Type	Description
doc	class DomDocument	The object itself
name	string
url	string
version	string	Version of XML
encoding	string
standalone	long	1 if the file is a standalone version
type	long	One of the constants in table ...
compression	long	1 if the file is compressed
charset	long

Table 4. DomNode class (methods)

Name	PHP name	Description
lastchild	domxml_last_child()
children	domxml_children()
parent	domxml_parent()
new_child	domxml_new_child()
get_attribute	domxml_get_attribute()
set_attribute	domxml_set_attribute()
attributes	domxml_attributes()
node	domxml_node()
set_content()	domxml_set_content

Table 5. DomNode class (attributes)

Name	Type	Description
node	class DomNode	The object itself
type	long
name	string
content	string

Table of Contents
xmldoc -- Creates a DOM object of an XML document
xmldocfile -- Creates a DOM object from XML file
xmltree -- Creates a tree of PHP objects from XML document
domxml_root -- Returns root element node
domxml_add_root -- Adds a further root node
domxml_dumpmem -- Dumps the internal XML tree back into a string
domxml_attributes -- Returns an array of attributes of a node
domxml_get_attribute -- Returns a certain attribute of a node
domxml_set_attribute --
domxml_children -- Returns children of a node or document
domxml_new_child -- Adds new child node
domxml_new_xmldoc -- Creates new empty XML document
xpath_new_context -- Creates new xpath context
xpath_eval -- Evaluates an xpath expression