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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] SimpleXML and JSON
From: dossche.niels@gmail.com (Niels Dossche)

On 14/08/2023 23:56, Rowan Tommins wrote:
> On 14 August 2023 13:40:40 BST, Niels Dossche <dossche.niels@gmail.com> wrote:
>>And you load it into simpleXML, the result of calling json_encode($the_simplexml_object)
> 
> My usual reaction to this is "why would you take an object designed for accessing parts of an XML document, and serialise it to JSON?" Often, the answer turns out to be "because I don't understand SimpleXML objects, and have copied and pasted a weird hack to get a less useful array representation by round-tripping to JSON".
> 

That's fair, I'm just trying to hear what people want here :-)

> On the other hand, the fact that the *debug* representation of SimpleXML objects misses out some parts causes a lot of confusion, and I've actually considered the *opposite* of what you suggest - leave the JSON alone, because people will have written production code based on it, but make the debug array more descriptive of how to use the object.
> 

I agree the debug info is lackluster at the moment.
e.g. If you var_dump a simpleXML object you don't even see the name or the type. So when you're debugging it becomes a bit more difficult to see what you're working with. Similarly, a getType() method would be handy to verify what's actually "behind" the simpleXML object.

> (...)
> 
> Ultimately, I'm not that interested in trying to come up with a JSON or array representation that covers every possibility, because I think the only consistent answer would be horribly verbose - basically, describe every property that DOM would expose on each node.

Probably yeah, I tried to come up with something but it was indeed verbose.

> For debug output, the main concern is showing what you'll get with various styles of access in SimpleXML, so a single "@text" => "foobarbaz" would make sense; or maybe even "(string)" => "foobarbaz" and rename "@attributes" to "->attributes()"

Having "->method()" might look a bit weird, at least I haven't seen something like this in other PHP extensions. Although it is more descriptive than "@attributes", because people may be led to believe you can do $simpleXML->{"@attributes"} or something like that. Adding a name and type in the output is also necessary I think.
Making such changes probably requires an RFC and some bikeshedding to make sure everyone agrees on it.

> 
> Regards,
> 

Kind regards