What is the difference between treating a SimpleXMLElement object as a string and as an array in PHP?

When treating a SimpleXMLElement object as a string in PHP, you will get the XML content as a string. However, when treating it as an array, you can access the XML elements and attributes directly as an associative array. To access specific elements or attributes, it is better to treat the SimpleXMLElement object as an array. 

// Treating SimpleXMLElement object as a string
$xmlString = (string) $xmlObject;

// Treating SimpleXMLElement object as an array
$xmlArray = json_decode(json_encode($xmlObject), true);

Keywords

SimpleXMLElement object string array PHP

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