preg_match and XML nodes

I'm reading an xml file. The xml file has several different nodes with the same name. When I use preg_match to get a specific node, it returns everything between the start of the first node of the desired name and the end of the last node of the desired name.
Here is the xml code

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<users>
 <user>
   <name>James Doe</name>
   <age>23</age>
 </user>
 <user>
   <name>Sally O' Mally</name>
   <age>50</age>
 </user>
 <user>
   <name>George Bush the 2nd</name>
   <age>50</age>
 </user>
</users>

Code (markup):

and here is my PHP code

$xml = file_get_contents('users.xml');
preg_match('/<name>([\s\S]*)<\/name>/',$xml,$userName);
print $userName[1];

Code (markup):

What that displays is

James Doe</name>
   <age>23</age>
 </user>
 <user>
   <name>Sally O' Mally</name>
   <age>50</age>

 </user>
 <user>
   <name>George Bush the 2nd

Code (markup):

I want it to only display the first name, James Doe.

It is important to note that the contents of the xml document change. The structure of course is always the same. I have played around with making the parameters more specific, but then it only works when I put the correct number of spaces.

 

Use this as your preg_match() search pattern:

'/\<name\>(.+)\<\/name\>/sU'

Code (markup):

Tested and works with your posted data file and 3-line code snippet.

 

Thanks. It works!

It looks like I needed to add \ before every arrow?

 

That and the (.+) as your main pattern, but the real secret is the sU pattern modifiers, as discussed here: http://us3.php.net/manual/en/reference.pcre.pattern.modifiers.php

Last year I wrote a bbcode parser, very similar in essence to what you're doing. Spent about a day mucking around with pattern modifiers and whatnot to get it to work. I just saw your post, so I dredged up my old code and then modified it to handle xml angle brackets instead of bbcode square brackets.

As an aside, the code works fine if you have spaces, tabs and line breaks around, between and within the <name> tags, so you might want to strip leading/trailing spaces off of $userName[1] after the preg() call.

If you're worried about spaces and tabs and linebreaks appearing within the name itself, you could also collapse those into a single space character after the preg() call as well.