How to convert array to XML format in PHP

How to convert an array to XML format in PHP

When developing web applications, we often need to deal with the transmission and storage of data. XML (Extensible Markup Language) is a widely used data format that can be used to transmit and store data between different systems. PHP, as a popular server-side programming language, provides many tools and functions to process XML data. This article will introduce how to convert an array in PHP to XML format.

In actual development, we usually use associative arrays to represent data, for example:

$data = [
   'name' => 'John Doe',
   'age' => 30,
   'email' => 'johndoe@example.com'
];

Next, we need to convert this associative array into a string in XML format. PHP provides a built-in function dom_import_simplexml and SimpleXMLElement class for creating and manipulating XML documents.

First, we need to create an XML document object:

$xmlDoc = new DOMDocument('1.0', 'UTF-8');

Then, we create the root node, usually using <root> as the root node:

$root = $xmlDoc->createElement('root');
$xmlDoc->appendChild($root);

Next, we iterate through each element of the array and convert each key-value pair into XML nodes and elements. We use recursive functions to process multi-level nested arrays.

function arrayToXml($data, $xmlDoc, $parentNode) {
   foreach ($data as $key => $value) {
      $node = $xmlDoc->createElement(is_string($key) ? $key : 'item');
      $parentNode->appendChild($node);

      if (is_array($value)) {
         arrayToXml($value, $xmlDoc, $node);
      } else {
         $text = $xmlDoc->createTextNode($value);
         $node->appendChild($text);
      }
   }
}

arrayToXml($data, $xmlDoc, $root);

Finally, we convert the XML document object to string format:

$xmlString = $xmlDoc->saveXML();

Now, we have successfully converted the array to XML format. The output can be printed using echo or saved to a file.

The complete sample code is as follows:

$data = [
   'name' => 'John Doe',
   'age' => 30,
   'email' => 'johndoe@example.com'
];

$xmlDoc = new DOMDocument('1.0', 'UTF-8');
$root = $xmlDoc->createElement('root');
$xmlDoc->appendChild($root);

function arrayToXml($data, $xmlDoc, $parentNode) {
   foreach ($data as $key => $value) {
      $node = $xmlDoc->createElement(is_string($key) ? $key : 'item');
      $parentNode->appendChild($node);

      if (is_array($value)) {
         arrayToXml($value, $xmlDoc, $node);
      } else {
         $text = $xmlDoc->createTextNode($value);
         $node->appendChild($text);
      }
   }
}

arrayToXml($data, $xmlDoc, $root);

$xmlString = $xmlDoc->saveXML();

echo $xmlString;

The above code will output the following XML string:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<root>
   <name>John Doe</name>
   <age>30</age>
   <email>johndoe@example.com</email>
</root>

Through the above example, we have learned how to convert an array in PHP to A string in XML format. This is very useful in data transfer and storage, especially when integrating with other systems. I hope this article can help you better understand and use PHP to process XML data.

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