Question

I have a website with a table that is populated with data from various external XML feeds. The table is generated using Javascript as after some reading, I found that this seemed to be the best approach for creating an HTML table from XML data (please correct me if wrong!).

I now want to parse this HTML table in to an RSS feed and I’m struggling to find the best way to do so. I have php code that will parse an HTML table, but because this table is generated using JS (ie. client side) the PHP parser does not work. Can anyone tell me the best way to go about this?

As you’ve probably gathered, I’m quite new to programming so layman terms would be much appreciated where possible.

Thanks a lot.

Answer 1

I found that this seemed to be the best approach for creating an HTML table from XML data (please correct me if wrong!).

As a rule of thumb, if instant feedback isn’t required (and it isn’t if you are fetching data from multiple external sources), if you can do it server side, then do it server side. You only have one server side environment to deal with instead of dozens of different client side environments (some of which could have JS turned off).

I now want to parse this HTML table in to an RSS feed and I’m struggling to find the best way to do so. I have php code that will parse an HTML table, but because this table is generated using JS (ie. client side) the PHP parser does not work. Can anyone tell me the best way to go about this?

Write PHP to get the data from wherever the JS gets its data from. You already have the logic to query it in JS, so you should be able to do a fairly straight port of that.