Question

I’m using simplexml to update an xml file with data from a wordpress site. Every time someone visits a page I want to add the page id and a views counter to the file in a nested structure like so…

<posts>
    <post>
        <postid>3231</postid>
        <postviews>35</postviews>
    </post>
    <post>
        <postid>7634</postid>
        <postviews>1</postviews>
    </post>
</posts>

The trouble I’m having is that the inserts are happening at the wrong point – and i’m getting the following…

<posts>
    <post>
        <postid>3231</postid>
        <postviews>35</postviews>
    <postid>22640</postid><postviews>1</postviews><postid>22538</postid><postviews>1</postviews></post>
</posts>

As you can see, the <postid> and <postviews> nodes aren’t being wrapped in a new <post> parent. Can anyone help me, it’s driving me nuts!

This is my code so far to check if the post id exists, and if not to add one…

//Get the wordpress postID
$postID = get_the_ID();

$postData = get_post($postID);

//echo $postID.'<br />'.$postData->post_title.'<br />'.$postData->post_date_gmt.'<br />';

// load the document
$xml = simplexml_load_file('/Applications/MAMP/htdocs/giraffetest/test.xml');

// Check to see if the post id is already in the xml file - has it already been set?
$nodeExists = $xml->xpath("//*[contains(text(), ".$postID.")]");

//Count the results
$countNodeExists = count($nodeExists);

if($countNodeExists > 0) {

    echo 'ID already here';

} else {
    echo 'ID not here';

    $postNode = $xml->post[0];
    $postNode->addChild('postid', $postID);
    $postNode->addChild('postviews', 1);
}

// save the updated document
$xml->asXML('/Applications/MAMP/htdocs/giraffetest/test.xml');

Thanks a lot, James

Answer 1

If you want a new <post> element inside your xml document you should have a addChild('post') somewhere in your code. Change the else part like this:

/* snip */
} else {
    $postNode = $xml->addChild('post'); // adding a new <post> to the top level node
    $postNode->addChild('postid', $postID); // adding a <postid> inside the new <post>
    $postNode->addChild('postviews', 1); // adding a postviews inside the new <post>
}