XML to JSON in PHP

Zimuel writes; Last friday, in occasion of the April Zend Framework Bug-Hunt, I started to look at this bug: ZF-3257. This is an issue related to the Zend_Json class that occurs during the conversion from XML to JSON for some specific XML documents, like this one:

$xml= 'bar';

The result using Zend_Json::fromXml($xml, false) , where false indicated the usage of XML attributes, was:

{"a":{"b":{"@attributes":{"id":"foo"}}}}

As you can see the bar value, of the a element, is not represented in JSON. This issue comes also with other XML documents, and in general when an XML node has a single character data child, any attributes are lost.

For instance, the following code:

$xml = 'bar';
echo Zend_Json::fromXml($xml, false);

Produced the output:

{"a":{"b":"bar"}}

in this case the attribute id and the value foo are lost.
Find a solution @ Zimuel’s blog.