Question

I’m trying to parse the contents of an remote XML file into MySQL, so I can put these contents in my database.

I’m not fimiliar with XML at all, so sorry if I’ll be asking stupid questions.

I have a site: http://www.hodexer.nl/hodex/uva/hodexDirectory.xml. For every hodexRecourse, I want to get the programID, and visit the URL stored in hodexResourceURL, and from that XML file, I want every programName and programSummary and store these into the database as well.

I know the global set up I should use, but I’m not getting very far. So far I have this:

$xmlstr = simpleXML_load_file('http://www.hodexer.nl/hodex/uva/hodexDirectory.xml');
  if ($xmlstr === FALSE) {
    show_404();
  }
  else {
    $xml = new SimpleXMLElement($xmlstr, NULL, TRUE);
    foreach ($xml->hodexResource as $temp) {
      echo $temp->programID;
  }

The echo is just for debugging purpouses. I get the following error: String could not be parsed as XML.

I hope you can help me out!

Answer 1

the function simpleXML_load_file returns an SimpleXmlObject, is not necessary to call the constructor, you can see this in http://www.php.net/manual/es/class.simplexmlelement.php

Try this code:

<?php
$xmlstr = simpleXML_load_file('http://www.hodexer.nl/hodex/uva/hodexDirectory.xml');
  //print_r ( $xmlstr ); //uncomment for debugging
  if ($xmlstr === FALSE) {
    show_404();
  }
  else {
    foreach ($xmlstr->hodexResource as $temp) {
      echo $temp->programId;
  }
}
?>