Retrieving a node list

[Eric A. <eri...@co...>]

All my XPath hacking has previously been with Perl using XML::XPath, but
I am working on a PHP project and I like using XPath retrieve config
info in little XML files. I came across this project and thought that it
looked pretty good, but I am having trouble figuring out how to do a
XPath query and get back a list of nodes. So for example if I have a XML
file as follows:

<root>
	<tag>item1</tag>
	<tag>item2</tag>
	<tag>item3</tag>
</root>

I want to be able to say something like:

$xPath = new XPath();
$xPath->importFromFile( $filename );
$list = $xPath->find( '/root/tag' );
foreach ($list as $item) {
	echo $item->getText() . '<br>';
}

and have it output:
item1
item2
item3

This is somewhat like the Perl syntax (mixed with a bit of your
libraries). But things that are missing are a method that takes a
XPathQuery and returns a list of nodes that match that query, and a
method on the node that will return the text inside the node.

I could probably achieve the second needed method by using the join
function on 'textParts' attribute of the Node, but that seems a bit
messy.

Basically I am wondering what is the best way of reading a list of nodes
that are returned from a XPathQuery. Everything in PHP.XPath seems to be
based around giving an absolute XPathQuery or a requiring that only one
node being returned by a query. How do you get a list of nodes that
match a path?

Thanks for your help and the great library. XPath greatly simplifies my
code, and I will be real happy if I can use it in this PHP project.

-- 
Eric Anderson

There are 10 types of people in the word
Those who can read binary, and those who can't