- var_dump: documentation ( source)
- simplexml_load_string: documentation ( source)
<?php
$str=<<<XML
<scales>
<scale id="1" gender="*" age="*">
<d scid="hi" raw="10" t="76" />
<d scid="pn" raw="12" t="80" />
</scale>
<scale id="2" gender="m" age="*">
<d scid="hi" raw="8" t="79" />
<d scid="pn" raw="2" t="50" />
</scale>
<scale id="3" gender="*" age="19-39">
<d scid="hi" raw="0" t="48" />
<d scid="pn" raw="10" t="49" />
</scale>
</scales>
XML;
$xml=simplexml_load_string($str);
$result=$xml->xpath('//scale[@gender="*" or @gender="m"][@age="*" or @age="39-59"/d]');
var_dump($result);