Blog Posts

Just added a new feature to the PHP DOM extension (will be available in PHP 5.2): DOMNode::getNodePath

With this, you can easily get an XPath for any given DOMNode, works also for attributes, text nodes, comments and all other node types. Here's a little example

<?php
$xml = '<foo>
            <bar>text</bar>
            <bar foo="bar">more text</bar>
             <!-- comment -->
        </foo>
';

$dom = new domdocument();
$dom->loadXML($xml);

$n = $dom->documentElement->firstChild->nextSibling;
$n2 = $n->nextSibling->nextSibling;

print $n->getNodePath() ."n";
print $n2->getNodePath() ."n";
print $n2->getAttributeNode("foo")->getNodePath() ."n";
print $n2->firstChild->getNodePath() ."n";
print $n2->nextSibling->nextSibling->getNodePath() ."n";

Which results in:

/foo/bar[1]
/foo/bar[2]
/foo/bar[2]/@foo
/foo/bar[2]/text()
/foo/comment()

It's basically just a simple wrapper for xmlGetNodePath from libxml2, maybe useful for some other people also.

BTW, I plan to write more about some new XML features, which are coming with PHP 5.2. It's not very much, but nevertheless interesting (Already a big thanks to Rob for his work)

Update: What will be new in PHP 5.2 in general can be seen here, somehow :)