DomDocument->saveXml without root node

Question

Is it possible to get xml string form DomDocument or SimpleXml without root node? DomDocument->saveXml() returns this:

<root>
    <item>text</item>
    <item>text</item>
</root>

And I need:

<item>text</item>
<item>text</item>

Can I get this with DomDocument? Is there any way to do this without regexp?

Answer 1

The "inner XML" is like "inner HTML" of the innerHTML property, so used in Javascript and other languages... I think we can ignore @michi comentary requiring some explanation. About @CBroe commentary: not make sense if you imagine DOMDocumentFragment, or a string-XML replace from a innerXML to another (ex. filtered) XML. Your good example (of item list) is a string-XML that can be also converted to a DOMNodeList.

---

The fasted and simplest way to get all XML is using the saveXML(), and it return a string that contains the string that you whant.

There are two ways to cut-off the part (a kind of "trim tag") that you not need:

By DOM

A loop over all $node->childNodes, concatenating each subnode by saveXML($subnode).

By regex

Perhaps more simple and fast, but not secure, something like

$innerXML = preg_replace(
    '#^\s*<([a-z0-9_:]+)[^>]*>(.+?)</\\1>\s*$#s', 
    '$2', 
    $dom->saveXML($node)
);