Format output of $SimpleXML->asXML(); [duplicate]

Question

This question already has an answer here:

• PHP simpleXML how to save the file in a formatted way? 4 answers

The title pretty much says it all.

If I have something like (from PHP site examples):

$xmlstr = <<<XML
<?xml version='1.0' standalone='yes'?>
<movies></movies>
XML;

$sxe = new SimpleXMLElement($xmlstr);

$sxe->addAttribute('type', 'documentary');

$movie = $sxe->addChild('movie');
$movie->addChild('title', 'PHP2: More Parser Stories');
$movie->addChild('plot', 'This is all about the people who make it work.');

$characters = $movie->addChild('characters');
$character  = $characters->addChild('character');
$character->addChild('name', 'Mr. Parser');
$character->addChild('actor', 'John Doe');

$rating = $movie->addChild('rating', '5');
$rating->addAttribute('type', 'stars');


echo("<pre>".htmlspecialchars($sxe->asXML())."</pre>");

die();

I end up outputing a long string like so:

<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<movies type="documentary"><movie><title>PHP2: More Parser Stories</title><plot>This is all about the people who make it work.</plot><characters><character><name>Mr. Parser</name><actor>John Doe</actor></character></characters><rating type="stars">5</rating></movie></movies>

This is fine for a program consumer, but for debugging/human tasks, does anyone know how to get this into a nice indented format?

Answer 1

Found a similar solution...to format raw xlm data..from my php SOAP requests __getLastRequest & __getLastResponse, for quick debugging the xml's i have combined it with google-code-prettify.

Its a good solution if you want to format sensitive xml data and don't want to do it online.

Some sample code below, may be helpful to others:

$dom = new DOMDocument;
$dom->preserveWhiteSpace = false;
$dom->formatOutput = true;
$dom->loadXML($data); //=====$data has the raw xml data...you want to format

echo '<script src="https://cdn.rawgit.com/google/code-prettify/master/loader/run_prettify.js"></script>';

echo "<br/> <pre class=\"prettyprint\" >". htmlentities($dom->saveXML())."</pre>";

Below is a sample of the Formatted XML Output I got:

Note: The formatted XML is available in $dom->saveXML() and can be directly saved to a xml file using php file write.

Answer 2

There's a variety of solutions in the comments on the PHP manual page for SimpleXMLElement. Not very efficient, but certainly terse, is a solution by Anonymous

$dom = dom_import_simplexml($simpleXml)->ownerDocument;
$dom->formatOutput = true;
echo $dom->saveXML();

The PHP manual page comments are often good sources for common needs, as long as you filter out the patently wrong stuff first.

Answer 3

The above didn't work for me, I found this worked:

$dom = new DOMDocument("1.0");
$dom->preserveWhiteSpace = false;
$dom->formatOutput = true;
$dom->loadXML($simpleXml->asXML());
echo $dom->saveXML();