How to Remove a Parent Node in SimpleXML Using XPath?

SimpleXML - Removing XPath Nodes

Question:

In SimpleXML, how can I delete a parent node associated with a specific element identified through XPath?

Problem Description:

Using the following code to find and remove an item with a specific item_id fails:

<code class="php">$xml = simplexml_load_file($filename);
$data = $xml-&gt;xpath('//items/info[item_id="' . $item_id . '"]');
$parent = $data[0]-&gt;xpath("parent::*");
unset($parent);</code>

The unset($parent) statement does not eliminate the parent <items> node.

Answer:

Directly calling unset() on an object variable ($parent in this case) only removes the object reference, not the node itself.

Solution Using DOMDocument:

<code class="php">$doc = new DOMDOcument;
$doc-&gt;loadxml(...XML string...);
$item_id = 456;

$xpath = new DOMXPath($doc);
foreach($xpath-&gt;query('//items[info/item_id="' . $item_id . '"]') as $node) {
  $node-&gt;parentNode-&gt;removeChild($node);
}</code>

This loop iterates through matching <items> nodes, removes the parent node, and updates the $doc object.

Output:

<code class="xml">&lt;?xml version=&quot;1.0&quot;?&gt;
&lt;foo&gt;
  &lt;items&gt;
    &lt;info&gt;
      &lt;item_id&gt;123&lt;/item_id&gt;
    &lt;/info&gt;
  &lt;/items&gt;

  &lt;items&gt;
    &lt;info&gt;
      &lt;item_id&gt;789&lt;/item_id&gt;
    &lt;/info&gt;
  &lt;/items&gt;
&lt;/foo&gt;</code>

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