XPath

Like the DOM extension, SimpleXML also supports XPath. Rather than using a separate class for it as the DOM does, the SimpleXMLElement class itself includes a method for it. Where the query() and evaluate() methods of the DOMXPath class return a DOMNodeList instance, the xpath method of SimpleXMLElement instead returns an enumerated array of SimpleXMLElement instances that match the given XPath expression.

<?php
// Returns all list items from the previous example
$elements = $sxe->xpath('//ul[@id="thelist"]/li');

// Outputs "Foo" then "Bar"
foreach ($elements as $li) {
echo $li, PHP_EOL;
}
?>