note 84365 modified in ref.simplexml by danbrown

There seems to be a lot of talk about SimpleXML having a "problem" with CDATA, and writing functions to rip it out, etc. I thought so too, at first, but it's actually behaving just fine under PHP 5.2.6 The key is noted above example #6 here: http://uk2.php.net/manual/en/simplexml.examples.php "To compare an element or attribute with a string or pass it into a function that requires a string, you must cast it to a string using (string). Otherwise, PHP treats the element as an object." If a tag contains CDATA, SimpleXML remembers that fact, by representing it separately from the string content of the element. So some functions, including print_r(), might not show what you expect. But if you explicitly cast to a string, you get the whole content. <?php $xml = simplexml_load_string('<foo>Text1 &amp; XML entities</foo>'); print_r($xml); /* SimpleXMLElement Object ( [0] => Text1 & XML entities ) */ $xml2 = simplexml_load_string('<foo><![CDATA[Text2 & raw data]]></foo>'); print_r($xml2); /* SimpleXMLElement Object ( ) */ // Where's my CDATA? // Let's try explicit casts print_r( (string)$xml ); print_r( (string)$xml2 ); /* Text1 & XML entities Text2 & raw data */ // Much better ?> --was-- There seems to be a lot of talk about SimpleXML having a "problem" with CDATA, and writing functions to rip it out, etc. I thought so too, at first, but it's actually behaving just fine under PHP 5.2.6 The key is noted above example #6 here: http://uk2.php.net/manual/en/simplexml.examples.php "To compare an element or attribute with a string or pass it into a function that requires a string, you must cast it to a string using (string). Otherwise, PHP treats the element as an object." If a tag contains CDATA, SimpleXML remembers that fact, by representing it separately from the string content of the element. So some functions, including print_r(), might not show what you expect. But if you explicitly cast to a string, you get the whole content. <?php $xml = simplexml_load_string('<foo>Text1 &amp; XML entities</foo>'); print_r($xml); /* SimpleXMLElement Object ( [0] => Text1 & XML entities ) */ $xml2 = simplexml_load_string('<foo><![CDATA[Text2 & raw data]]></foo>'); print_r($xml2); /* SimpleXMLElement Object ( ) */ // Where's my CDATA? // Let's try explicit casts print_r( (string)$xml ); print_r( (string)$xml2 ); /* Text1 & XML entities Text2 & raw data */ // Much better ?> http://php.net/manual/en/ref.simplexml.php