Unable to get comment contents in SimpleXML

[nielsdos]

Description

Bug report or feature request, I don't know for sure... Could be considered either?

Anyway:

<?php

$sxe = simplexml_load_string(<<<XML
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<container>
    <bar>hi</bar>
    <!-- comment -->
</container>
XML);

var_dump((string) $sxe->bar);
var_dump((string) $sxe->comment);

Gives output:

string(2) "hi"
string(0) ""

But I expected:

string(2) "hi"
string(7) "comment"

Looking at the documentation for __toString: https://www.php.net/manual/en/simplexmlelement.tostring.php

Returns text content that is directly in this element. (...)

Well, the confusing thing is that every XML node is called a SimpleXMLElement in ext/simplexml, even if they're not XML elements. But that aside, if I read the docs as "Returns text content that is directly in this node." then I would expect the cast to give me the comment contents, as that's the text inside of it.