XPath is a query language for selecting XML nodes. Suppose that you have a collection of companies represented in an XML document.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <companies> A�A�<company> A�A�A�A�<name>Apple</name> A�A�A�A�<ceo>Steve Jobs</ceo> A�A�</company> A�A�<company> A�A�A�A�<name>Microsoft</name> A�A�A�A�<ceo>Steve Ballmer</ceo> A�A�</company> A�A�<company> A�A�A�A�<name>Google</name> A�A�A�A�<ceo>Larry Page</ceo> A�A�</company> A�A�<company> A�A�A�A�<name>Intel</name> A�A�A�A�<ceo>Paul S. Otellini</ceo> A�A�</company> </companies>
The XPath query to select Google is illustrated below.
/companies/company[name='Google']
PHP5 supports the DOMXPath class for executing XPath queries for DOM trees. This is illustrated below.
<?php
$xmlDocument = new DOMDocument();
// Load the XML document
$xmlDocument->load('companies.xml');
$xPath = new DOMXPath($xmlDocument);
// Define the XPath query to select Google
$xPathQuery = "/companies/company[name='Google']";
// Execute the query
$queryNodes = $xPath->query($xPathQuery);
// Iterate through the results
foreach($queryNodes as $companyNode){
// Print the node name
print $companyNode->nodeName."\n";
foreach($companyNode->childNodes as $companyChildNode){
// Only print element nodes
if($companyChildNode->nodeType == XML_ELEMENT_NODE){
// Print the node name and value
print $companyChildNode->nodeName .
": ".$companyChildNode->nodeValue."\n";
}
}
}
?>
Output:
company name: Google ceo: Larry Page