Figuring out how to access the properties of a SimpleXmlElement object was a little tricky for me. In particular, it took a while to discover that I needed to cast my SimpleXmlElement properties to be of type "string" to print them or do comparisons on them. For instance, assuming you already have a string of xml in $xmlstr...
<?php
$sxml= new SimpleXmlElement($xmlstr);
if ((string) $sxml->property== "somevalue") {
echo (string) $sxml->property;
}
?>
The properties of a SimpleXmlElement object are objects themselves, so you need to put "(string)" before them, which casts their values to a string instead of an object. I assume if you were doing a numeric comparison you'd want to cast to an (int) or something numeric instead.