Access XML nodes inside php functions

Question

I was trying to extract from an XML file using SimpleXML xpath() function. I registered a new namespace and it works perfectly.

$data  = simplexml_load_string('sample.xml');
$data->registerXPathNamespace("a", "http://ns.hr-xml.org/2007-04-15");
$education = $data->xpath("//a:Education"); 
$this->saveEducationData($education);

The issue is how can i access an an XML node inside a function ? The below code doesn't work. Should a register a namespace again ?

function saveEducationData($data = ''){
  $school =  $data->xpath('/a:Institution');
}

Any help will be highly appreciated.

Sample xml data

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Resume xmlns="http://ns.hr-xml.org/2007-04-15" xmlns:bgt="http://wsi.com/wsinamespace" xmlns:msxsl="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:xslt">
<SResume>
<Education>
<School>
<SchoolName>Jane Institute of Technology</SchoolName>
<Address>
<Country>USA</Country>
<Region>NY</Region>
</Address>
<Degree>
<Name>MS</Name>
<StartDate>
<StringDate>2007-09-01</StringDate>
</StartDate>
<EndDate>
<StringDate>2010-05-01</StringDate>
</EndDate>
</School>
<School>
<SchoolName>Cochin Universityy</SchoolName>
<Address>
<Country>IN</Country>
<Region>COC</Region>
</Address>
<Degree>
<Name>BTech in computer science</Name>
<StartDate>
<StringDate>2005-04-10</StringDate>
</StartDate>
<EndDate>
<StringDate>2009-01-10</StringDate>
</EndDate>
</School>
<School>
<SchoolName>Indian institute of Geographic studies</SchoolName>
<Address>
<Country>IN</Country>
<Region>ALP</Region>
</Address>
<Degree>
<Name>DIploma in cartography </Name>
<StartDate>
<StringDate>2002-08-18</StringDate>
</StartDate>
<EndDate>
<StringDate>2005-01-08</StringDate>
</EndDate>
</School>
</Education>
</SResume>
</Resume>

Regards, Tismon Varghese.

Answer 1

You could read your XML using DOMDocument:

$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->loadXML($xmlstr);

$elements = $doc->getElementsByTagName("Education");
$value = $elements->item(0)->nodeValue;

var_dump($value);

where $xmlstr is your XML as a string.

To read the value you can simply pass the element to the function where you would like to extract the value.