XML to PHP array convertor

Smart tool to convert your XML to PHP array.

Install and simply use

Use Composer:

composer require gaarf/xml-to-php-array

And then package will be automatically installed to your project and you can simply call:

$resultArray = Convertor::covertToArray($xml);

Documentation

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:

$a = json_decode(json_encode((array) Convertor::covertToArray($s)), true);

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

---

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

[janbarasek#13] Add support for PHP 7.1 + better code style.

[janbarasek#15] Rewrite repository as Composer package.

[roland-d#18] Treat empty node as string