Selecting peculiar XML tags with phpQuery

php, phpquery, xml

Solution

You are trying to find a `thumb` element which belongs to the `isc` namespace (see XML namespace); not a tag named `isc:thumb`.

phpQuery can happily query for namespaced elements, just not like you are trying to do. Instead, simply provide the tag in the form `namespace|tagname` (i.e. `isc|thumb`). It is also worth noting that the namespace will have to be registered with phpQuery's XPath handler (which is just a `DOMXPath` object) for it to be able to recognise the namespace.

Here's a quick example with a sample XML document (obviously, use your own XML and be sure to provide the correct namespace URI).

phpQuery::newDocumentXML('<root xmlns:isc="urn.example.isc">
  <isc:thumb><![CDATA[http://example.com/foo_thumb.jpg]]></isc:thumb>
  <isc:thumb><![CDATA[http://example.com/bar_thumb.jpg]]></isc:thumb>
</root>
');
phpQuery::getDocument()->xpath->registerNamespace('isc', 'urn.example.isc');
foreach ( pq("isc|thumb") as $thumbnail ) {
    echo pq( $thumbnail )->text() . PHP_EOL;
}

Which outputs:

http://example.com/foo_thumb.jpg
http://example.com/bar_thumb.jpg

Problem

phpQuery is a really nice tool which has helped me tremendously in the past parse well-formed XHTML and XML documents, but I have recently run into a problem trying to select elements that have colons in their tagname, such as the following: ``` <isc:thumb><![CDATA[http://example.com/foo_thumb.jpg]]></isc:thumb> ``` I've tried to use the `pq()` function to select all of these elements: ``` foreach ( pq("isc:thumb") as $thumbnail ) { print pq( $thumbnail )->text(); } ``` Unfortunately this is doing nothing. If I try another element, like a tagname of `id`, the results pop up as expected.

Original source