Json encode from XML file creates empty array if element in XML is empty [duplicate]

Question

I have a XML file, where some elements will be empty. The issue is, that this code, creates an empty array, if the element is empty. Som for the XML example below, the result from JSON_DECODE would be:

I have tried setting depth to two, with no luck.

[26272] => Array (
    [productname] => Some product name
    [ean] => Array ( )
)

Example XML:

<item>
    <productname>Some product name</productname>
    <ean></ean>
</item>

The code i´m using:

$xml = simplexml_load_file($url);
$json = json_encode($xml,JSON_PRETTY_PRINT);
$products = json_decode($json, TRUE);

Answer 1

Just for info, if someone else can use it. I figured it out, by this post, and used this function, to run through and replace the empty arrays:

function replaceArrayToString($arr) {
   $newArr = array();
   foreach($arr as $key=>$value)
   {
       if (is_array($value))
       {
          unset($arr[$key]);

           //Is it an empty array, make it a string
           if (empty($value)) {
               $newArr[$key] = '';
           }
           else {
               $newArr[$key] = replaceArrayToString($value);
           }

       }
       else {
           $newArr[$key] = $value; 
       }

   }
   return $newArr;

}