How to Efficiently Parse SOAP XML with Namespace Prefixes Using SimpleXML?

How to Parse SOAP XML: Stripping Namespace Prefixes for SimpleXML

When parsing SOAP XML documents, namespace prefixes can present challenges for libraries like simplexml. This issue arises when encountering XML responses similar to the following:

<soap:Envelope xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/">
  <soap:Body>
    <PaymentNotification xmlns="http://apilistener.envoyservices.com">
      <payment>
        <!-- Payment data -->
      </payment>
    </PaymentNotification>
  </soap:Body>
</soap:Envelope>

Attempts to parse such an XML string using simplexml, such as the following code, often result in empty results:

$xml = simplexml_load_string($soap_response);
$xml->registerXPathNamespace('soap', 'http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/');
foreach ($xml->xpath('//payment') as $item)
{
    print_r($item);
}

To resolve this issue and successfully parse SOAP XML with namespace prefixes, a simple yet effective approach is to strip these prefixes before passing the XML to simplexml. Here's how it's done:

$your_xml_response = '<Your XML here>';
$clean_xml = str_ireplace(['SOAP-ENV:', 'SOAP:'], '', $your_xml_response);
$xml = simplexml_load_string($clean_xml);

By removing the namespace prefixes, the XML becomes easier for simplexml to parse. The resulting SimpleXMLElement object would contain the desired data nested under and . This technique allows you to conveniently manipulate and access the parsed SOAP XML data as needed.

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