SimpleXMLElementPlugin.php

Show all properties and methods.

Alright kids, let's learn about SimpleXMLElement::children! children can take a namespace url or alias and provide a list of child nodes. This is great since just accessing the members through properties doesn't work on SimpleXMLElement when they have a namespace at all! Unfortunately SimpleXML decided to go the retarded route of categorizing elements by their tag name rather than by their local name (to put it in Dom terms) so if you have something like this: <root xmlns:localhost="http://localhost/"> <tag /> <tag xmlns="http://localhost/" /> <localhost:tag /> </root> children(null) will get the first 2 results children('', true) will get the first 2 results children('http://localhost/') will get the last 2 results children('localhost', true) will get the last result So let's just give up and stick to aliases because fuck that mess!

More SimpleXMLElement bullshit. If we want to know if the element contains text we can cast to string. Except if it contains text mixed with elements simplexml for some stupid reason decides to concatenate the text from between those elements rather than all the text in the hierarchy... So we have NO way of getting text nodes between elements, but we can still tell if we have elements right? If we have elements we assume it's not a string and call it a day! Well if you cast the element to an array attributes will be on it so you'd have to remove that key, and if it's a string it'll also have the 0 index used for the string contents too... Wait, can we use the 0 index to tell if it's a string? Nope! CDATA doesn't show up AT ALL when casting to anything but string, and we'll still get those concatenated strings of mostly whitespace if we just do (string) and check the length. Luckily, I found the only way to do this reliably is through children(). We still have to loop through all the namespaces and see if there's a match but then we have the problem of the attributes showing up again... Or at least that's what var_dump says. And when we cast the result to bool it's true too... But if we cast it to array then it's suddenly empty! Long story short the function below is the only way to reliably check if a SimpleXMLElement has children