Question

I have been working on a project that displays data in an XML file. (It’s kind of like an API). I know how to parse XML with PHP, and how to make an XML file in PHP, but they don’t work together. 🙂

Basically, I have two files: parse.php and xml.php.

xml.php grabs info from a MySQL database, and outputs it as XML.

parse.php loads and parses xml.php and outputs it as HTML.

If I run parse.php, it does not load xml.php. However, if I copy the outputted XML (from xml.php) and save it as a xml.xml file (and change the filename in parse.php to ‘xml.xml’) it works. I’d really appreciate any help.

Content of parse.php:

<?php

    $doc = "xml.php";

    $doc = @simplexml_load_file($doc) or die("Server Error: Recipe not found!");

    $title = $doc->title;

    echo $title

?>

Content of xml.php:

<?php

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

    $dbc = mysql... //gets data from database

    echo "<!DOCTYPE..."; //xml stuff here

    echo "<title>" . $dataFromMySQL . "</title>";

?>

The database connection works, and the DOCTYPE in the XML is ok, so that’s not the problem.

Again, I only get the problem when I generate XML dynamically using PHP. If it’s a .XML file, it works fine.

Can anyone help me?

Thanks.

Answer 1

@simplexml_load_file($doc);

That is where your problem is. This does not execute xml.php, but attempts to parse that file — the PHP code that you’ve written — as XML. Obviously (since it isn’t XML) this won’t work.

You have to find a way of getting the output from executing xml.php into parse.php.

The easy way to do this would be to change all your echo calls into $xml .= calls, and simply include xml.php into parse.php.

// xml.php
$xml = '';
$xml .= "<!DOCTYPE..."; //xml stuff here

$output .= "<title>" . $dataFromMySQL . "</title>";

// parse.php
include('xml.php');

simplexml_load_string($xml);

Note that your problem here shows the foolishness of using the error suppression operator @. If you hadn’t used it, PHP would have shown you various errors which would have helped you to realise what the problem was.

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Addendum: it occurs to me that the best way actually is to forget about the pointless XML step along the way and just convert the database output into HTML.