xml - PHP DOM: How to get child elements by tag name in an elegant manner?

Question

I'm parsing some XML with PHP DOM extension in order to store the data in some other form. Quite unsurprisingly, when I parse an element I pretty often need to obtain all children elements of some name. There is the method DOMElement::getElementsByTagName($name), but it returns all descendants with that name, not just immediate children. There is also the property DOMNode::$childNodes but (1) it contains node list, not element list, and even if I managed to turn the list items into elements (2) I'd still need to check all of them for the name. Is there really no elegant solution to get only the children of some specific name or am I missing something in the documentation?

Some illustration:

<?php

DOMDocument();
$document->loadXML(<<<EndOfXML
<a>
  <b>1</b>
  <b>2</b>
  <c>
    <b>3</b>
    <b>4</b>
  </c>
</a>
EndOfXML
);

$bs = $document
    ->getElementsByTagName('a')
    ->item(0)
    ->getElementsByTagName('b');

foreach($bs as $b){
    echo $b->nodeValue . "
";
}

// Returns:
//   1
//   2
//   3
//   4
// I'd like to obtain only:
//   1
//   2

?>

Answer 1

simple iteration process

$parent = $p->parentNode;

foreach ( $parent->childNodes as $pp ) {

    if ( $pp->nodeName == 'p' ) {

        if ( strlen( $pp->nodeValue ) ) {
            echo "{$pp->nodeValue}
";
        }

    }

}