PHP XML Parser - ignoring nested/child tags

I've got a situation where I'm using an XML parser to extract data from a php://input.

The data being sent in looks like:-

<this>foo</this>
<that>bar></that>
<data><dong>zebras</dong><fong>monkeys</fong></data>

Now, the issue is that because the handler:-

      $xml_parser = xml_parser_create();

   xml_parser_set_option($xml_parser, XML_OPTION_CASE_FOLDING, false);
   xml_set_element_handler($xml_parser, "startTag", "endTag");
   xml_set_character_data_handler($xml_parser, "contents");

   $document = file_get_contents("php://input");       

   xml_parse($xml_parser, $document);

   xml_parser_free($xml_parser);

...is interpreting tags for me to decifer the contents to make it useful... It seems to be missing anything within i.e. I need to find out how i can get it to ignore the child/nested elements/tags and just bosh out the data whatever.

Any thoughts muchos help. I've not found much about this out there.

From stackoverflow

• I'm not sure if I understood the question correctly, but

  <?php
  function contents($parser, $data) {
    echo $data;
  }
  
  
  $xml_parser = xml_parser_create();
  xml_parser_set_option($xml_parser, XML_OPTION_CASE_FOLDING, false);
  // xml_set_element_handler($xml_parser, "startTag", "endTag");
  xml_set_character_data_handler($xml_parser, "contents");
  // $document = file_get_contents("php://input");
  $document = '<x><this>foo</this><that>bar</that><data><dong>zebras</dong><fong>monkeys</fong></data></x>';
  xml_parse($xml_parser, $document);
  xml_parser_free($xml_parser);

  prints

  foobarzebrasmonkeys

  WiseDonkey : Hi Volkerk, Thanks for the response. What i need it to do it say foobarzebrasmonkeys i.e. withinn all contents is printed, almost as source, with tags.

• WideDonkey, have you considered using the DOM instead? You can easily do :

  $dom = new DOMDocument();
  $dom->loadXML(file_get_contents('php://input'));
  
  $data = $dom->getElementsByTagName('data');
  $data = $data[0]->asXML();
  

• Comment on Evert's answer: DOMNodeElement doesn't have a method asXML(), $data = $data[0]->asXML(); will not work with PHP-DOM. And SimpleXMLElement::asXML() will return the whole element's xml, i.e. <data>...</data>
  But you can modify the XML Element Structure Example to print the tags in your element handler functions when the counter is > 1

• What I ended up doing was using SimpleXML to do:-

  $xml = new SimpleXMLElement($input);
  
  $whatIwant = $xml->bar->monkeys
  

  You can go down as many levels as you want such as test

  The $xml is the furthest out wrapper tag.

• phpQuery gives you all the power of jQuery Selectors wrapped up in a PHP shell.

  phpQuery::newDocumentFileXHTML('my-xhtml.html')->find('p');