When converting xml to php array, empty xml fields creating empty array, not empty string

I am using a nice short piece of code to turn my XML string into a php array

$products = json_decode(json_encode(simplexml_load_string($products_xml)),TRUE);

      

        
        
        
      

    

Everything works fine except when the xml field is empty, when I get an empty array and not a string - and when it writes to my SQL database, I see the string "Array" and not an empty field.

Is there a good way to do this using php?

In the meantime, I managed to solve the problem with this code:

$products = json_decode(str_replace('{}', '""', json_encode(simplexml_load_string($products_xml))),TRUE);