One common need when working in PHP is a way to convert an XML document into a serializable array. If you ever tried to serialize() and then unserialize() a SimpleXML or DOMDocument object, you know what I’m talking about.

Assume the following XML snippet:

<tv>
  <show name="Family Guy">
    <dog>Brian</dog>
    <kid>Chris</kid>
    <kid>Meg</kid>
  </show>
</tv>

There’s a quick and dirty way to do convert such a document to an array, using type casting and the JSON functions to ensure there are no exotic values that would cause problems when unserializing:

<?php
  $a = json_decode(json_encode((array) simplexml_load_string($s)),1);
?>

Here is the result for our sample XML, eg if we print_r($a):

Array
(
    [show] => Array
        (
            [@attributes] => Array
                (
                    [name] => Family Guy
                )
            [dog] => Brian
            [kid] => Array
                (
                    [0] => Chris
                    [1] => Meg
                )
        )
)

Pretty nifty, eh? But maybe we want to embed some HTML tags or something crazy along those lines. then we need a CDATA node…

<tv>
  <show name="Family Guy">
    <dog>Brian</dog>
    <kid>Chris</kid>
    <kid>Meg</kid>
    <kid><![CDATA[<em>Stewie</em>]]></kid>
  </show>
</tv>

The snippet of XML above would yield the following:

Array
(
    [show] => Array
        (
            [@attributes] => Array
                (
                    [name] => Family Guy
                )
            [dog] => Brian
            [kid] => Array
                (
                    [0] => Chris
                    [1] => Meg
                    [2] => Array
                        (
                        )
                )
        )
)

That’s not very useful. We got in trouble because the CDATA node, a SimpleXMLElement, is being cast to an array instead of a string. To handle this case while still keeping the nice @attributes notation, we need a slightly more verbose conversion function. This is my version, hereby released under a do-whatever-but-dont-sue-me license.

The result, for our Stewie snippet:

Array
(
    [show] => Array
        (
            [@attributes] => Array
                (
                    [name] => Family Guy
                )
            [dog] => Brian
            [kid] => Array
                (
                    [0] => Chris
                    [1] => Meg
                    [2] => <em>Stewie</em>
                )
        )
)

Victory is mine! :D

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Contributions

[clh-code#1] If a node has attributes, but contains only text, then the output will be an array with both @content and @attributes keys

[reggi#4] store root element tag name in @root