Question about php domelement objects

[George Thorogood]

Hello all. When I do a print_r of a domelement object I get something like this:

domelement Object
(
[type] => 1
[tagname] => category
[0] => 6
[1] => 1007543104
)

What are those "0" and "1" internal variables? I can not seem to find any description
of them anywhere. What do they represent? The "0" one seems to stay constant with a
constant xml source. But the "1" one is always different though still unique. Are
these variables a php thing only? Or part of the dom specification that I missed?

Also how do I access them? I can do a "$node->tagname" or "$node->type" just fine to
get access to those internal object variables. But php does not like "$node->0" at all.
What's the problem? Some kinda of variable scoping or something?

Lastly, I don't suppose there is any way to search by these "0" variables with an
xpath_eval statement?

The problem is this: I will be receiving an xml file with all these nested "category"
elements. They only have "name" attributes, which unfortunately, I can not be guaranteed
will be unique. But I still need some unique way to identify them. Short of adding
attributes to each "category" element, I was hoping to use this "0" internal object
variable, or perhaps, the position() function from xpath. But I have no idea how to
determine an elements position when all I have is the domelement object.

Thanks for any help!

[Janwillem Borleffs]

Re: Question about php domelement objects

George Thorogood wrote:[color=blue]
> Hello all. When I do a print_r of a domelement object I get
> something like this:
>
> domelement Object
> (
> [type] => 1
> [tagname] => category
> [0] => 6
> [1] => 1007543104
> )
>
> What are those "0" and "1" internal variables? I[/color]

I was unable to reproduce this output, can you post a snippet which results
in this?
[color=blue]
> But I have
> no idea how to determine an elements position when all I have is the
> domelement object.
>[/color]

With an XPath expression, you can group category elements with equal values
for the name attributes:

//category[@name='value']

If you want the first matching node, just do:

//category[@name='value'][1]


JW