From PHP manual: Accessing elements within an XML document that contain characters not permitted under PHP’s naming convention (e.g. the hyphen) can be accomplished by encapsulating the element name within braces and the apostrophe. In your case you do: $xml->{‘custom-field-value’}
Your assumption is correct. Use $officeXML->{‘document-meta’} to make it work. Please note that the above applies to Element nodes. Attribute nodes (those within the @attributes property when dumping the SimpleXmlElement) do not require any special syntax to be accessed when hyphenated. They are regularly accessible via array notation, e.g. $xml = <<< XML <root> <hyphenated-element … Read more