SimpleXML and Default Cast To String

Hello Adam,

Thursday, January 8, 2004, 12:59:19 AM, you wrote:

From my opinion the current behavior is perfect because i see simplexml from
an xml developers side and not from an html developers side. The former must
typically know exactly where his strings comme from while the latter has
only text to deal with and often has situations where he needs to filter out
formatting tags like the <i> in the example.

All of my SimpleXML work is strictly XML, too. However, my thought was
that I could always call strip_tags() to eliminate the information I
didn't want, but there was no apply_tags() function to do the
reverse. :) Therefore, it was better to use the other method.

Well there's ext/SPL in PECL. A SimpleXML Object is also a Iterator and
it is a RecursiveIterator if ext/SPL is build in. Then SPL also offers a
RecursiveIteratorIterator that taks a RecursiveIterator...so it is just a
foreach-four-liner.

$text = '';
forach(new RecursiveIteratorIterator($sxe) as $el) {
$text .= $el;
}

So i'd say let us add a method for returning the complete content. Adam
could you do that?

That wouldn't be too difficult (although I am busy for the next day or
two). However, as much as I loathe toggles, I'm wondering if it
wouldn't be better to make this an object-wide setting. My thought are
that on an object-by-object basis, you either always want tags or
never want them.

Something like:

$sxe = simplexml_load_file('doc.xml');
$sxe->displayTags = true;

This would keep the interface clean. Or would that just confuse things
with more magic?

Also, what would the default behavior should be? I can argue both
sides of the issue right now. :)

The idea is really nice but you mentioned the problems yourself it is
increasing the wtf factor. Maybe we implement both getContent and getText
and do this kind of magic in the next version aka 5.1?

--
Best regards,
Marcus mailto:helly@php.net

BTW, I can send my source implementation of my toString() method which
returns the full content. Then you can do what you need in terms of
renaming, etc.

Thanks!

Blake Schwendiman

----- Original Message -----
From: "Adam Maccabee Trachtenberg" adam@trachtenberg.com
To: "Marcus Boerger" helly@php.net
Cc: "Blake Schwendiman" blake@mediafence.com; internals@lists.php.net
Sent: Wednesday, January 07, 2004 4:59 PM
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] SimpleXML and Default Cast To String

From my opinion the current behavior is perfect because i see simplexml
from
an xml developers side and not from an html developers side. The former
must
typically know exactly where his strings comme from while the latter has
only text to deal with and often has situations where he needs to filter
out
formatting tags like the <i> in the example.

All of my SimpleXML work is strictly XML, too. However, my thought was
that I could always call strip_tags() to eliminate the information I
didn't want, but there was no apply_tags() function to do the
reverse. :) Therefore, it was better to use the other method.

So i'd say let us add a method for returning the complete content. Adam
could you do that?

That wouldn't be too difficult (although I am busy for the next day or
two). However, as much as I loathe toggles, I'm wondering if it
wouldn't be better to make this an object-wide setting. My thought are
that on an object-by-object basis, you either always want tags or
never want them.

Something like:

$sxe = simplexml_load_file('doc.xml');
$sxe->displayTags = true;

This would keep the interface clean. Or would that just confuse things
with more magic?

Also, what would the default behavior should be? I can argue both
sides of the issue right now. :)

-adam

--
adam@trachtenberg.com