I think I figured out what is going on. Given code like this:
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement('<xml></xml>');
$xml->addChild('node','value');
print_r($xml);
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement('<xml></xml>');
$xml->addChild('node','');
print_r($xml);
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement('<xml></xml>');
$xml->addChild('node');
print_r($xml);
The output is this:
SimpleXMLElement Object
(
[node] => value
)
SimpleXMLElement Object
(
[node] => SimpleXMLElement Object
(
[0] =>
)
)
SimpleXMLElement Object
(
[node] => SimpleXMLElement Object
(
)
)
So, to make it so that in case #2 the empty element isn't created (i.e. if you don't know if the second argument is going to be an empty string or not), you could just do something like this:
$mystery_string = '';
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement('<xml></xml>');
if (preg_match('#\S#', $mystery_string)) // Checks for non-whitespace character
$xml->addChild('node', $mystery_string);
else
$xml->addChild('node');
print_r($xml);
echo "\nOr in JSON:\n";
echo json_encode($xml);
To output:
SimpleXMLElement Object
(
[node] => SimpleXMLElement Object
(
)
)
Or in JSON:
{"node":{}}
Is that what you want?
Personally, I never use SimpleXML, and not only because of this sort of weird behavior -- it is still under major development and in PHP5 is missing like 2/3 of the methods you need to do DOM manipulation (like deleteChild, replaceChild etc).
I use DOMDocument (which is standardized, fast and feature-complete, since it's an interface to libxml2).