Question

I have this HTTP Post function in php which sends a form to a competition webservice, the response is an XML which gives further details if the entry was successful or not, how can I parse the results to capture the status field and give further feedback to the user?

Here is the code used:

<?php
$url = "...webserviceurl...";
$body = "userName=".$_POST["username"]."&password=".........;
$ch = curl_init(); 
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url); 
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array("Content-Type: application/x-www-form-      urlencoded")); 
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $body); 
//curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);  
$result = curl_exec ($ch); 
curl_close ($ch); 
print $result;
?>

Thanks

Answer 1

You can use the PHP DOMDocument library and DOMXpath libraries to run xpath queries on the XML:

$dom = new DOMDocument();
$dom->loadXML($result);

$xpath = new DOMXpath($dom);
echo $xpath->evaluate('string(//Error)'); // echo contents of <Error> ... </Error> node

If the response has an XML namespace that is unusual (like some APIs tend to do), you have to register the namespace and prefix all queries with it.

$xpath->registerNamespace('ns', 'https://namespace.org/namespace');
echo $xpath->evaluate('string(//ns:Error)');