How to Remove an XPath Node in SimpleXML Without Losing the Entire Structure?

How to Remove an XPath Node with SimpleXML

Finding and removing an XML node using XPath queries can be a challenge in SimpleXML. This article addresses the issue of deleting a parent node identified through an XPath search.

Consider the following example:

<code class="php">$xml = simplexml_load_file($filename);
$data = $xml->xpath('//items/info[item_id="' . $item_id . '"]');
$parent = $data[0]->xpath("parent::*");
unset($parent);</code>

In this code, the goal is to delete the parent node for a specific product identified by its . However, using unset($parent) does not remove the node because it only eliminates the reference to the object stored in $parent.

A solution is to revert to using DOMDocument for this task:

<code class="php">$doc = new DOMDocument;
$doc->loadxml('<foo>
  <items>
    <info>
      <item_id>123</item_id>
    </info>
  </items>
  <items>
    <info>
      <item_id>456</item_id>
    </info>
  </items>
  <items>
    <info>
      <item_id>789</item_id>
    </info>
  </items>
</foo>');
$item_id = 456;

$xpath = new DOMXpath($doc);
foreach($xpath->query('//items[info/item_id="' . $item_id . '"]') as $node) {
  $node->parentNode->removeChild($node);
}
echo $doc->savexml();</code>

This code will remove the node containing the specified from the XML document. It uses the removeChild() method to delete the node from its parent.

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