How can I parse XML to get multiple text blocks with SimpleXML?

Question

I want to parse some XML that looks like this:

<node>
  This is
  <child>
    blah
  </child>
  some
  <child>
    foo
  </child>
  text
</node>

How do I get access to the text node children in Simple XML?

Can I access them in the correct order of text and element children?

Do I need some other package for this?

Answer 1

I'd strongly recommend switching to the DOM functions over SimpleXML. I had an answer like this a while ago which wasn't very popular, but I still stand by it. The DOM functions are just so much powerful: the extra verbosity is worth it.

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

foreach ($doc->documentElement->childNodes as $node) {
    if ($node->nodeType === XML_TEXT_NODE) {
        echo $node->nodeValue . "\n";
    }
}

Answer 2

foreach($this->xml->xpath('/node/child') as $child){
   ...
}