How to Effectively Remove a Child Element with a Specific Attribute in PHP's SimpleXML?

Removing a Child with a Specific Attribute in SimpleXML for PHP

In SimpleXML, accessing and modifying XML documents can be convenient. However, when it comes to removing specific child elements, certain limitations may arise.

Consider the following XML structure:

<data>
    <seg></seg></data>

To remove the seg element with an id of "A12" using SimpleXML, you might attempt the following code:

foreach($doc->seg as $seg)
{
    if($seg['id'] == 'A12')
    {
        unset($seg);
    }
}

Unfortunately, this approach will not remove the desired element due to SimpleXML's shallow modification depth. To truly remove it, consider utilizing the following solution:

Using DOM Extension

The DOM extension provides an alternative method for modifying XML documents. By converting your SimpleXMLElement into a DOMElement using dom_import_simplexml(), you can access more powerful manipulation capabilities.

$data = '<data>
    <seg></seg></data>

This code successfully removes the target seg element, resulting in the following XML:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<data><seg></seg></data>

XPath for Targeted Selection

Additionally, using XPath with SimpleXML provides a concise way to select specific nodes:

$segs = $doc->xpath('//seg[@id="A12"]');
if (count($segs) >= 1) {
    $seg = $segs[0];
}
// Same deletion procedure as above

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