PHP 7.0.6 Released

    XMLReader::read

    (PHP 5 >= 5.1.0, PHP 7)

    XMLReader::read — Move to next node in document

    Description

    public bool XMLReader::read ( void )

    Moves cursor to the next node in the document.

    Return Values

    Returns TRUE on success or FALSE on failure.

    See Also

    User Contributed Notes

    jirka at kosek dot cz
    10 years ago
    libxml2 contains much more useful method readString() that will read and return whole text content of element. You can call it after receiving start tag (XMLReader::ELEMENT). You can use this PHP code to emulate this method until PHP will directly call underlying libxml2 implementation.

    <?php
    class XMLReader2 extends XMLReader
    {
      function     readString()
      {
                $depth = 1;
                $text = "";

            while (    $this->read() && $depth != 0)
            {
                if (    in_array($this->nodeType, array(XMLReader::TEXT, XMLReader::CDATA, XMLReader::WHITESPACE, XMLReader::SIGNIFICANT_WHITESPACE)))
                        $text .= $this->value;
                if (    $this->nodeType == XMLReader::ELEMENT) $depth++;
                if (    $this->nodeType == XMLReader::END_ELEMENT) $depth--;
            }
            return     $text;
        }
    }
    ?>

    Just use XMLReader2 instead of XMLReader.
    Nate
    4 years ago
    It is interesting to note that this function will stop on closing tags as well.  I have an XML document similar to the following:

    <root>
      <columns>
        <column>columnX</column>
        <column>columnY</column>
      </columns>
      <table>
        <row>
          <columnX>38</columnX>
          <columnY>50</columnY>
        </row>
        <row>
          <columnX>82</columnY>
          <columnY>28</columnY>
        </row>
        ...
      </table>
    </root>

    I need to parse the <columns> object to know what attributes to check for from each <row> node.  Therefore I was doing the following:

    <?php
    while ($xml->read()) {
      if (    $xml->name === 'column') {
           //parse column node to into $columns array
          }
      elseif (    $xml->name === 'row') {
            //parse row node, using constructed $columns array
          }
    }
    ?>

    This kind of worked in that I ended up with an array of all the data I wanted, but the array I constructed was twice as large as I expected and every other entry was empty.  Took me a while to debug, but finally figured out that checking <?php $xml->name === 'row' ?> matches both <row> and </row>, so the check should really be something more like:

    <?php

    if ($xml->name === 'row' && $xml->nodeType == XMLReader::ELEMENT) {
          // parse row node
    }

    ?>

    I would have liked to use the next() function instead, but as I needed to parse 2 different subtrees, I couldn't figure out how to find all the columns, reset the pointer, and then find all the rows.
    ecziegler at gmail
    2 years ago
    If like myself you have been turning the interwebz upside down looking for a solution for this issue:
    PHP Warning:  XMLReader::read(): /tmp/xml_feed.xml:4183934: parser error : Input is not proper UTF-8, indicate encoding !

    For some reason, this warning breaks the execution - is it a fatal error in disguise?

    After days of frustration I found it!!!!
    tidy -xml -o output.xml -utf8 -f error.log input.xml

    You can invoque tidy using exec, It takes several seconds to convert a 250Mb feed, but it worthy the time.

    In my case the issue was with latin1 charset, and for some reason I had to pass the xml through tidy 2 times - first time around creates new errors, second time it fixes everything.

    I know invalid xml should be fixed by xml creators, but it works differently in the real world.
    Anonymous
    1 year ago
    > I would have liked to use the next() function instead, but as I needed to parse 2 different subtrees, I couldn't figure out how to find all the columns, reset the pointer, and then find all the rows.

    I just use:

    $reader->close();
    $reader->open($url);

    to reset the pointer.
    Yannik
    6 years ago
    If you have trouble parsing xml documents with text tags bigger than 10MB, this might help you:

    <?php
    $xmlreader     = new XMLReader();
    $xmlreader->open($uri, null, 1<<19);
    ?>

    Since in libxml there is a constant
    XML_PARSE_HUGE = 1<<19
    which enables parsing xml documents with huge texts.

    Please note that this option is not accessible using the setParserProperty method and that there is currently no constant to do the work, which will hopefully change soon:

    http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=49660
    andy at siliconrockstar dot com
    4 years ago
    A very simple way to avoid typing $reader->read() multiple times when you want to skip some nodes:

    <?php
    class smartXMLReader extends XMLReader {
        public function     readTimes($count) {
                $i = 0;
            while(    $i < $count){
                    $this->read();
                    $i++;
            }
        }
    }
    ?>

    Using this smartXMLReader,

    <?php
    $reader    ->readTimes(3);
    ?>

    is equivalent to

    <?php
    $reader    ->read();
    $reader->read();
    $reader->read();
    ?>

    Makes getting around in your XML document a bit easier :)
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