SimpleXML var_dump() weirdness

[Mattias Thorslund <mattias@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

It seems that var_dump() of a SimpleXMLElement does not show an 
attribute of elements that contain text content?

I hope my examples might show what I mean:

$xml = '<root rootattr="root value"><inner attr="value"/></root>';
$simple = new SimpleXMLElement($xml);
var_dump($simple);
echo $simple->asXML();

This results in:

object(SimpleXMLElement)#1 (2) {
 ["@attributes"]=>
 array(1) {
   ["rootattr"]=>
   string(10) "root value"
 }
 ["inner"]=>
 object(SimpleXMLElement)#2 (1) {
   ["@attributes"]=>
   array(1) {
     ["attr"]=>
     string(5) "value"
   }
 }
}
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<root rootattr="root value"><inner attr="value"/></root>

...and that's fine, though it would have been nice to also know that the 
root element is called "root".

The second example manifests the weirdness:

$xml = '<root rootattr="root value"><inner 
attr="value">text</inner></root>';
$simple = new SimpleXMLElement($xml);
var_dump($simple);
echo $simple->asXML();

Outputs:

object(SimpleXMLElement)#1 (2) {
 ["@attributes"]=>
 array(1) {
   ["rootattr"]=>
   string(10) "root value"
 }
 ["inner"]=>
 string(4) "text"
}
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<root rootattr="root value"><inner attr="value">text</inner></root>

Notice that the attribute "attr" of the element "inner" is not displayed.

In the third case, I replace the content of the "inner" element with 
another element:

$xml = '<root rootattr="root value"><inner 
attr="value"><deep/></inner></root>';
$simple = new SimpleXMLElement($xml);
var_dump($simple);
echo $simple->asXML();

Outputs:

object(SimpleXMLElement)#1 (2) {
 ["@attributes"]=>
 array(1) {
   ["rootattr"]=>
   string(10) "root value"
 }
 ["inner"]=>
 object(SimpleXMLElement)#2 (2) {
   ["@attributes"]=>
   array(1) {
     ["attr"]=>
     string(5) "value"
   }
   ["deep"]=>
   object(SimpleXMLElement)#3 (0) {
   }
 }
}
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<root rootattr="root value"><inner attr="value"><deep/></inner></root>

The "invisible" attributes are still accessible with xpath(), etc (the 
asXML() dump shows that it is still present, but just not visible. This 
might be a bug? Or am I just not understanding something?

Cheers,

Mattias
PHP 5.2.6

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