Question

I have a xml file in this format:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<adp_report name="Average Draft Position - Mixed 5x5" rundate="2013-01-29 17:22:10.0" begin="2013-01-26" end="2013-01-29" draftcount="126">
     <player id="500736" name="Mike Trout" position="OF" team="ANA" adp="1.66" early="1" late="4" selections="126" />
     <player id="291154" name="Ryan Braun" position="OF" team="MIL" adp="2.01" early="1" late="4" selections="126" />
     <player id="213968" name="Miguel Cabrera" position="3B" team="DET" adp="2.55" early="1" late="4" selections="126" />
</adp_report>

I need to load this into php where I will be able to access it by finding the name attribute and what the corresponding adp is. I am using it to perform some calculations and insert the results into a table that is being called from a MYSQL database. This is what I have so far:

$url = '...some url';
$xml = simplexml_load_file($url);    
while($row = mysqli_fetch_array($resultbat, MYSQLI_ASSOC))
  {
       echo "<td>" . $row['NAME'] . "</td>";
       ...print out some more player data from database...

       foreach($xml->player as $player)
            {
                $attr = $player->attributes();

                if($attr['name'] == $row['NAME']) //$row['NAME'] is the players name from my database
                {
                    $adp = (float) $attr['adp'];
                    $early = (int) $attr['early'];      

                    $stdev = -0.42+0.42*($adp-$early);
                    if($stdev<0)
                        $stdev = 1;
                    $chance =number_format(((1-NORMDIST($pickNumber,$adp,$stdev,TRUE))*100), 0);

                  echo "<td class='adp'>".$adp."</td>";
                  echo "<td class='chance'>".$chance."%</td>";
                  break;
                }
            }
}

This takes a while to process because I’m going through every row in my player database, then using foreach to look through the xml file and if I find a match I do the calculations. I have to imagine there is a more efficient way to go about this. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You could use XPath (see: SimpleXMLElement::xpath() and XPath documentation). So, instead of your foreach loop, this:

$player = $xml->xpath('//player[@name="' . $row['NAME'] . '"]');
if (is_array($player) && count($player)) {
    $player = $player[0];
} else {
    continue; // not found
}
$attr = $player->attributes();
// and so on...