How to convert xml to array in php

In many web applications, XML is widely used as a common data transmission format. As a common web development language, PHP naturally needs to be able to process XML data easily. In PHP, converting XML data to array is a very common need. This article will explain how to convert XML data into an array using PHP.

First, to convert XML data into an array, you need to use simplexml_load_string(), a built-in function in PHP. This function loads an XML string into PHP and parses it, returning a SimpleXMLElement instance. SimpleXMLElement is a class in PHP specifically used to process XML data. It contains many useful methods to traverse and manipulate XML data.

Suppose we have the following XML data:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<bookstore>
  <book category="children">
    <title lang="en">Harry Potter</title>
    <author>J.K. Rowling</author>
    <price>29.99</price>
  </book>
  <book category="fiction">
    <title lang="en">The Hunger Games</title>
    <author>Suzanne Collins</author>
    <price>22.99</price>
  </book>
</bookstore>

We can use the simplexml_load_string() function to load it into PHP:

$xml = '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
        <bookstore>
          <book category="children">
            <title lang="en">Harry Potter</title>
            <author>J.K. Rowling</author>
            <price>29.99</price>
          </book>
          <book category="fiction">
            <title lang="en">The Hunger Games</title>
            <author>Suzanne Collins</author>
            <price>22.99</price>
          </book>
        </bookstore>';

$xmlObj = simplexml_load_string($xml);

Now $xmlObj is a SimpleXMLElement instance, we can use its methods to traverse and manipulate XML data. However, if we need to further process the XML data, such as filtering and sorting certain nodes, it is not convenient to use SimpleXMLElement. Therefore, we need to convert it to an array.

Converting SimpleXMLElement to an array is very simple, just add an (array) cast before the object:

$xmlArr = (array) $xmlObj;
print_r($xmlArr);

The above code will output the following results:

Array
(
    [book] => Array
        (
            [0] => Array
                (
                    [@attributes] => Array
                        (
                            [category] => children
                        )

                    [title] => Array
                        (
                            [@attributes] => Array
                                (
                                    [lang] => en
                                )

                            [0] => Harry Potter
                        )

                    [author] => J.K. Rowling
                    [price] => 29.99
                )

            [1] => Array
                (
                    [@attributes] => Array
                        (
                            [category] => fiction
                        )

                    [title] => Array
                        (
                            [@attributes] => Array
                                (
                                    [lang] => en
                                )

                            [0] => The Hunger Games
                        )

                    [author] => Suzanne Collins
                    [price] => 22.99
                )
        )
)

As you can see, we get a two-dimensional array, in which each node is converted into an associative array. If there are multiple nodes with the same name in the XML data, they will be converted into an array. For example, the two books here are converted into a book array.

It should be noted that in the converted array, each node has a key named @attributes, which corresponds to the attributes of the node. For example, the book node has a category attribute, and its value is converted to the value of the @attributes['category'] key.

In addition, since SimpleXMLElement is a recursive structure, it contains many nested child nodes. Therefore, the converted array is also a recursive structure, where each sub-array corresponds to a child node.

Of course, if there are some special nodes in the XML data that require special processing, such as CDATA nodes, empty nodes, etc., you need to use some special methods to handle them. But for ordinary XML data, using simplexml_load_string() and (array) cast is convenient enough to convert XML data into an array.

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