Format Output of $Simplexml->Asxml();

Format output of $SimpleXML-asXML();

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.

Prettifying/Formatting output in SimpleXML

AFAIK simpleXML can't do it on its own.

However, DOMDocument can.

$dom = dom_import_simplexml($sxe)->ownerDocument;
$dom->formatOutput = TRUE;
$formatted = $dom->saveXML();

xml formatting- simple xml does not do pretty formatting (indent formatting)

First of all you were successful in finding out that DOMDocument supports formatted XML while SimpleXMLElement does not. And that is totally correct.

So as you want to use SimpleXMLElement to actually create the XML document but you also want to benefit from the formatting options from DOMDocument you might want to learn about the fact that both libraries are sister-libraries that work very well with each other. You already sort of seem to know about that as you make use of simplexml_import_dom to convert a DOMNode object into it's SimpleXMLElement object.

You however seem to miss how near you already were. Please see the following example which I copied from your question - I just added a single line at the very end (and change the filename to standard output so it echoes out the documents):

$dom = new domDocument;

$dom->formatOutput = true;
$root = $dom->appendChild($dom->createElement( "user" ));
$sxe = simplexml_import_dom( $dom );
$sxe->addChild("firstname", "John");
$sxe->addChild("surname", "Brady");

$sxe->asXML('php://output');
$dom->save('php://output');

The SimpleXMLElement::saveXML() method will use non-formatted output while the DOMDocument::save() method will use the formatting as you set the parameters for:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<user><firstname>John</firstname><surname>Brady</surname></user>
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<user>
  <firstname>John</firstname>
  <surname>Brady</surname>
</user>

And that's it already.

How to save changed SimpleXML object back to file?

Not sure I understand the issue. The asXML() method accepts an optional filename as param that will save the current structure as XML to a file. So once you have updated your XML with the hints, just save it back to file.

// Load XML with SimpleXml from string
$root = simplexml_load_string('<root><a>foo</a></root>');
// Modify a node
$root->a = 'bar';
// Saving the whole modified XML to a new filename
$root->asXml('updated.xml');
// Save only the modified node
$root->a->asXml('only-a.xml');

PHP XML how to output nice format

You can try to do this:

...
// get completed xml document
$doc->preserveWhiteSpace = false;
$doc->formatOutput = true;
$xml_string = $doc->saveXML();
echo $xml_string;

You can make set these parameter right after you've created the DOMDocument as well:

$doc = new DomDocument('1.0');
$doc->preserveWhiteSpace = false;
$doc->formatOutput = true;

That's probably more concise. Output in both cases is (Demo):

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<root>
  <error>
    <a>eee</a>
    <b>sd</b>
    <c>df</c>
  </error>
  <error>
    <a>eee</a>
    <b>sd</b>
    <c>df</c>
  </error>
  <error>
    <a>eee</a>
    <b>sd</b>
    <c>df</c>
  </error>
</root>

I'm not aware how to change the indentation character(s) with DOMDocument. You could post-process the XML with a line-by-line regular-expression based replacing (e.g. with preg_replace):

$xml_string = preg_replace('/(?:^|\G)  /um', "\t", $xml_string);

Alternatively, there is the tidy extension with tidy_repair_string which can pretty print XML data as well. It's possible to specify indentation levels with it, however tidy will never output tabs.

tidy_repair_string($xml_string, ['input-xml'=> 1, 'indent' => 1, 'wrap' => 0]);

echo simplexml object

Part 1

This is still not exactly what I wanted, but rather a very tidy and organized way of echoing the xml data:

    $url = "http://www.blogger.com/feeds/6552111825067891333/posts/default";
$xml = simplexml_load_file($url);
echo '<pre>';
print_r($xml);

Part 2

I had to get firephp running so I could see exactly what elements php was encountering when it reached an entry without a blog title. Ultimately it is an empty array. Therefore, the simple:

if(empty($entry->title))

works perfectly. For string comparison, I found that you can simply cast it as a string. For my purposes, that was unnecessary.

PHP SimpleXML new line

You can do this using the formatOutput property of DOMDocument.

Save your XML like this instead, presuming your XML is in a variable called $yourXML, and you want to save it to a file at $xmlFilePath:

$dom = new DOMDocument();
$dom->loadXML($yourXML);
$dom->formatOutput = true;
$formattedXML = $dom->saveXML();

$fp = fopen($xmlFilePath,'w+');
fwrite($fp, $formattedXML);
fclose($fp);

Code adapted from here.

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