Writer

The XML Writer class.

This class works exactly as PHP's built-in XMLWriter, with a few additions.

Namespaces can be registered beforehand, globally. When the first element is written, namespaces will automatically be declared.

The writeAttribute, startElement and writeElement can now take a clark-notation element name (example: {http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom}link).

If, when writing the namespace is a known one a prefix will automatically be selected, otherwise a random prefix will be generated.

Instead of standard string values, the writer can take Element classes (as defined by this library) to delegate the serialization.

The write() method can take array structures to quickly write out simple xml trees.

Full name: \Sabre\Xml\Writer
Parent class: XMLWriter

Properties

adhocNamespaces

Any namespace that the writer is asked to write, will be added here.

protected array $adhocNamespaces

Any of these elements will get a new namespace definition every single time they are used, but this array allows the writer to make sure that the prefixes are consistent anyway.

namespacesWritten

When the first element is written, this flag is set to true.

protected bool $namespacesWritten

This ensures that the namespaces in the namespaces map are only written once.

Methods

write

Writes a value to the output stream.

public write(mixed $value): mixed

The following values are supported: 1. Scalar values will be written as-is, as text. 2. Null values will be skipped (resulting in a short xml tag). 3. If a value is an instance of an Element class, writing will be delegated to the object. 4. If a value is an array, two formats are supported.

Array format 1: [ "{namespace}name1" => "..", "{namespace}name2" => "..", ]

One element will be created for each key in this array. The values of this array support any format this method supports (this method is called recursively).

Array format 2:

[ [ "name" => "{namespace}name1" "value" => "..", "attributes" => [ "attr" => "attribute value", ] ], [ "name" => "{namespace}name1" "value" => "..", "attributes" => [ "attr" => "attribute value", ] ] ]

Parameters:

Parameter	Type	Description
`$value`	mixed

startElement

Opens a new element.

public startElement(string $name): bool

You can either just use a local elementname, or you can use clark- notation to start a new element.

Example:

$writer->startElement('{http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom}entry');

Would result in something like:

<entry xmlns="http://w3.org/2005/Atom">

Note: this function doesn't have the string typehint, because PHP's XMLWriter::startElement doesn't either.

Parameters:

Parameter	Type	Description
`$name`	string

writeElement

Write a full element tag and it's contents.

public writeElement(mixed $name, array|string|object|null $content = null): bool

This method automatically closes the element as well.

The element name may be specified in clark-notation.

Examples:

$writer->writeElement('{http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom}author',null); becomes:

$writer->writeElement('{http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom}author', [ '{http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom}name' => 'Evert Pot', ]); becomes: Evert Pot

Note: this function doesn't have the string typehint, because PHP's XMLWriter::startElement doesn't either.

Parameters:

Parameter	Type	Description
`$name`	mixed
`$content`	array\|string\|object\|null

writeAttributes

Writes a list of attributes.

public writeAttributes(array $attributes): mixed

Attributes are specified as a key->value array.

The key is an attribute name. If the key is a 'localName', the current xml namespace is assumed. If it's a 'clark notation key', this namespace will be used instead.

Parameters:

Parameter	Type	Description
`$attributes`	array

writeAttribute

Writes a new attribute.

public writeAttribute(string $name, string $value): bool

The name may be specified in clark-notation.

Returns true when successful.

Note: this function doesn't have typehints, because for some reason PHP's XMLWriter::writeAttribute doesn't either.

Parameters:

Parameter	Type	Description
`$name`	string
`$value`	string

Inherited methods

pushContext

Create a new "context".

public pushContext(): mixed

This allows you to safely modify the elementMap, contextUri or namespaceMap. After you're done, you can restore the old data again with popContext.

popContext

Restore the previous "context".

public popContext(): mixed

Automatically generated on 2025-03-18