Question

I am trying to get MySQL database into an xml file; here is my code:

  <?php

  header("Content-type: text/xml");

    include 'dbc.php';

      $query = "SELECT * FROM airports LIMIT 50";
      $result = mysql_query($query, $link)
      or die('Error querying database.');

  $xml = new SimpleXMLElement('<xml/>');

  while($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) {
   $draw = $xml->addChild('draw');
   $draw->addChild('ident',htmlentities(iconv("UTF-8", "ISO-8859-1//IGNORE",$row['ident'])));
   $draw->addChild('name',htmlentities(iconv("UTF-8", "ISO-8859-1//IGNORE",$row['name'])));
  }

  mysql_close($link);
  $fp = fopen("links2.xml","wb");
  fwrite($fp,$xml->asXML());
  fclose($fp);

Here is the error Im getting:

  XML Parsing Error: no element found
  Location: /sql2xml2.php
  Line Number 1, Column 2: 
  -^

What am I doing wrong???

Answer 1

Your XML is considered invalid in your XML reader because of the thrown warning, thus the XML Parsing Error: junk after document element issue.

As for the warning itself, you need to escape special entities (namely &, < and > in your content when adding it like that (using str_replace usually works well for only those 3 when it comes to XML, htmlentities may yield undesired effects, unless you supply PHP 5.4’s ENT_XML1 mode).

Refer to a related answer for more information of why this happens.