Question

I’m getting a lot of errors when I browse a clients site securely that have to do with the simplexml_load_file function. Here’s an example:

Warning: simplexml_load_file() [function.simplexml-load-file]: https://xxxxxxxx/settings.xml:1: parser error : Document is empty in /xx/xx/xx/xx/xx/ on line 0

The site is on a dedicated server from SingleHop. It only happens when I browse the site with https://, and works fine when browsed with http://.

Seems to be loading the XML file just fine with https:// as well:
https://consumerstrust.org/wp-content/plugins/easyfanpagedesign/framework/settings.xml

The XML is parsed from a class:

public function efpd_load_settings($xmlfile){
    $xmlparse=simplexml_load_file($xmlfile);
    $settings=array();
    $setint=0;
    foreach($xmlparse->option as $xml){
        $option[$setint]=(array)$xml;
        array_push($settings,$option[$setint]);
        $setint++;
    }
    return $settings;
}

and ran like this:

$efpdxml=plugins_url('settings.xml',__FILE__); // plugins_url() is a WP function - returns the value just fine.
$efpdsettings=Efpd::efpd_load_settings($efpdxml);

Is this something that happens commonly? Also anything to fix it? If you need any more info to help me solve this just let me know and I will provide it.

Thanks.

Answer 1

I figured out my own problem, but thank you to those of you who tried helping me. I appreciate it.

My solution:

This was being run in WordPress, so I really should have posted this in the WPSE site, but I don’t blame anyone for not knowing all about WP from this site if they didn’t.

The function plugins_url() should not have been used to define the path to the XML file, I should have been using dirname(__FILE__).'/settings.xml' – which is pretty obvious as to why if you know how plugins_url() works, I overlooked it completely but in the end solved my problem.