PHP: How to handle <![CDATA[ with SimpleXMLElement?

I noticed that when using SimpleXMLElement on a document that contains those CDATA tags, the content is always NULL. How do I fix this?

Also, sorry for spamming about XML here. I have been trying to get an XML based script to work for several hours now...

<content><![CDATA[Hello, world!]]></content>

I tried the first hit on Google if you search for "SimpleXMLElement cdata", but that didn't work.

Solution 1:

You're probably not accessing it correctly. You can output it directly or cast it as a string. (in this example, the casting is superfluous, as echo automatically does it anyway)

$content = simplexml_load_string(
    '<content><![CDATA[Hello, world!]]></content>'
);
echo (string) $content;

// or with parent element:

$foo = simplexml_load_string(
    '<foo><content><![CDATA[Hello, world!]]></content></foo>'
);
echo (string) $foo->content;

You might have better luck with LIBXML_NOCDATA:

$content = simplexml_load_string(
    '<content><![CDATA[Hello, world!]]></content>'
    , null
    , LIBXML_NOCDATA
);

Solution 2:

The LIBXML_NOCDATA is optional third parameter of simplexml_load_file() function. This returns the XML object with all the CDATA data converted into strings.

$xml = simplexml_load_file($this->filename, 'SimpleXMLElement', LIBXML_NOCDATA);
echo "<pre>";
print_r($xml);
echo "</pre>";

Fix CDATA in SimpleXML

Solution 3:

This did the trick for me:

echo trim($entry->title);

Solution 4:

This is working perfect for me.

$content = simplexml_load_string(
    $raw_xml
    , null
    , LIBXML_NOCDATA
);

Solution 5:

When to use LIBXML_NOCDATA ?

I add the issue when transforming XML to JSON.

$xml = simplexml_load_string("<foo><content><![CDATA[Hello, world!]]></content></foo>");
echo json_encode($xml, true); 
/* prints
   {
     "content": {}
   }
 */

When accessing the SimpleXMLElement object, It gets the CDATA :

$xml = simplexml_load_string("<foo><content><![CDATA[Hello, world!]]></content></foo>");
echo $xml->content; 
/* prints
   Hello, world!
*/

I makes sense to use LIBXML_NOCDATA because json_encode don't access the SimpleXMLElement to trigger the string casting feature, I'm guessing a __toString() equivalent.

$xml = simplexml_load_string("<foo><content><![CDATA[Hello, world!]]></content></foo>", null, LIBXML_NOCDATA);
echo json_encode($xml);
/*
 {
   "content": "Hello, world!"
 }
*/