I need to get a XML File into a Database. Thats not the problem. Cant read it, parse it and create some Objects to map to the DB. Problem is, that sometimes the XML File can contain namespaces and sometimes not. Furtermore sometimes there is no namespace defined at all.

So what i first got was something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<struct xmlns:b="http://www.w3schools.com/test/">
<objects>
<object>
<node_1>value1</node_1>
<node_2>value2</node_2>
<node_3 iso_land="AFG"/>
<coords lat="12.00" long="13.00"/>
</object>
</objects>
</struct>

And the parsing:

$t = $xml->xpath('/objects/object');    
foreach($nodes AS $node) {  
    if($t[0]->$node) {
        $obj->$node = (string) $t[0]->$node;
    }
}

Thats fine as long as there are no namespaces. Here comes the XML File with namespaces:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<b:struct xmlns:b="http://www.w3schools.com/test/">
<b:objects>
<b:object>
<b:node_1>value1</b:node_1>
<b:node_2>value2</b:node_2>
<b:node_3 iso_land="AFG"/>
<b:coords lat="12.00" long="13.00"/>
</b:object>
</b:objects>
</b:struct>

I now came up with something like this:

$xml = simplexml_load_file("test.xml");
$namespaces = $xml->getNamespaces(TRUE); 
$ns = count($namespaces) ? 'a:' : ''; 
$xml->registerXPathNamespace("a", "http://www.w3schools.com/test/");

$nodes = array('node_1', 'node_2');

$obj = new stdClass();

foreach($nodes AS $node) {
    $t = $xml->xpath('/'.$ns.'objects/'.$ns.'object/'.$ns.$node);   
    if($t[0]) {
        $obj->$node = (string) $t[0];
    }
}

$t = $xml->xpath('/'.$ns.'objects/'.$ns.'object/'.$ns.'node_3');
if($t[0]) {
    $obj->iso_land = (string) $t[0]->attributes()->iso_land;
}    

$t = $xml->xpath('/'.$ns.'objects/'.$ns.'object/'.$ns.'coords');
if($t[0]) {
    $obj->lat = (string) $t[0]->attributes()->lat;
    $obj->long = (string) $t[0]->attributes()->long;
}

That works with namespaces and without. But i feel that there must be a better way. Before that i could do something like this:

$t = $xml->xpath('/'.$ns.'objects/'.$ns.'object');  
foreach($nodes AS $node) {  
    if($t[0]->$node) {
        $obj->$node = (string) $t[0]->$node;
    }
}

But that just wont work with namespaces.