Question

I am getting the following PHP Fatal Error

Fatal error: Uncaught exception ‘Exception’ with message ‘String could not be parsed as XML’ in Stack trace …

And the error log is pointing to the line

$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($data);

(which is the very next line after the code except below) as the culprit.

However, when I run each feed individually, there is no error and the feed saves to the database.

This is the code that produces the error:

$feeds = array( 
     'http://www.mtv.com/rss/news/news_full.jhtml',
     'http://www.musicweek.com/rss.asp?navcode=232',
     'http://www.cmt.com/rss/news/latestcached.jhtml',
     'http://www.billboard.com/rss/news',
 );

foreach ($feeds as $feed)
{
    $ch = curl_init();

     // causes error:
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $feed);

    // works:
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://www.billboard.com/rss/news');

    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0 );
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
    $data = curl_exec($ch); // put data from rss url into variable
    curl_close($ch);
    ...

If I switch the commented lines and use the $feed variable, error and white page. It worked fine before this afternoon, so I am suspecting that there is something that is XML illegal in one of the feeds triggering this.

Is there a better way to write this -or- some way to catch the exception if necessary?

Answer 1

The culprit is http://www.mtv.com/rss/news/news_full.jhtml . If you load the page, you get a lovely error. Here’s Chrome’s:

This page contains the following errors:

error on line 296 at column 38: Opening and ending tag mismatch:
shorthead line 0 and i Below is a rendering of the page up to the
first error.

The faulty line in question currently reads:

<shorthead>Big K.R.I.T. Promises </i>Live From The Underground<i> In Early 2012</shorthead>

No surprise that it failed at all.

---

As for catching the error, wrap your code in

try {
     //... your code ...
} catch(Exception $exception){
     //. . . Do somethign with exception ... 
}