note 80171 deleted from ref.simplexml by danbrown

Note Submitter: tom at canobe dot com ---- The earlier poster is right in that simplexml becomes pretty useless when you have mixed-content XML. This means that you basically cant use simplexml for (X)HTML, which is a bit of a blow. Here's a potential solution (hack) for those of you just finding out the mixed-content problem and not wanting to rewrite using DOM. This probably only really works if you have well-formed xhtml, which in my case I have from running some html through Tidy beforehand. Before passing to simplexml, run a couple of regexs on the html to put all the mixed content inside <span>s. This gets handled as separate elements in the tree. // put all text content inside a <span> because simplexmlelement // doesnt handle mixed content. // lesson learnt: dont use simplexmlelement for html $html = preg_replace('|>\s*<|','><',$html); $html = preg_replace('|>\s*([^<]+)\s*|','><span>\1</span>',$html);