xmlToItems

Owned by Former user (Deleted)
Last updated: May 02, 2023 by David Bateson
2 min read



Function: xmlToItems()

Extracts nodes from a chunk of XML (a string) and creates a list of items - which can be processed just as any list of values in PhixFlow.

Returns null when the extract fails.

Syntax

xmlToItems(XML, XPath)

ArgumentTypeDescription
XMLStringThe full XML data, stored in a string variable.
XPathStringXPath expression to extract data from the XML.
Note : XPath is a w3 standard language for addressing parts of an XML document. For more details see www.w3.org/TR/xpath

Common Errors

"NCNames cannot start with the characters XX" 

XML Headers cannot start with numbers, so an error like this means somewhere within the JSON there is a key value that starts with a number, or an invalid character.  In the below JSON, we can see a key that starts with the number 9. This cannot be converted to XML, so the invalid character(s) need to be removed and replaced before xmlToItems() can be performed. 

"flags_options": {
"9": {
"trusted": true
}
},
"trusted": true

For example, in this case the following replaceAll() expression can be used to replace the key with the text "number"

replaceAll($cleanJSON,'"\\d+":','"number":')

See Regular Expressions

Examples

If we add some xml into a $-variable:

do(
   $xml =
   '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?><store><thing category="X1"><name>Item1</name><price>15.00</price></thing><thing category="X2"><name>Item2</name><price>17.99</price></thing></store>',
 
   xmlToItems($xml, "/store/thing/price")
 
)
 
/*
 * Where the xml would expanded would look like the below:
 *
   '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
   <store>
      <thing category="X1">
         <name>Item1</name>
         <price>15.00</price>
      </thing>
      <thing category="X2">
         <name>Item2</name>
         <price>17.99</price>
      </thing>
   </store>',
 *
 */

Returns the values (in a list):

[15.00, 17.99]

See Also