Question

My Xml looks like this example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Allvotes>
  <vote score="2" ip="116.971.203.221"/>
  <vote score="5" ip="32.97.233.5"/>
  <vote score="3" ip="212.977.233.225"/>
  <vote score="5" ip="2.80.233.225"/>
</Allvotes>

When on my flash website (AS2), somebody press “vote” button, script in PHP getting his IP… What I want is run specyfic function, depends on his IP exist in xml file or not.

If his IP already exist, PHP send message: “ALREADY VOTED!”, when IP doesn’t exist in XML, then I want to run function which store his vote score and IP in xml.

So far I know that this PHP script not works:

$dom = new DomDocument('1.0', 'UTF-8');
$myXML = "votes.xml";
$s="";
if ($_POST['todo']=="vote"){
    $ip=$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
    $dom->load($myXML);
    $allVotes= $dom->getElementsByTagName('vote');
    foreach ($allVotes as $vote){
        if ($vote->getAttribute('ip')==$ip){
            $s.="&msg= Already Voted";
            echo $s;
            break;
        }else{
            doOtherStuff
        }
    }
}

The problem is that this loop fire “doOtherStuff” function when IP is not in first node…

Is there any magic trick to do that?

Answer 1

Why your code does not work

To answer the immediate question: you need to defer the “already voted?” test until you have iterated over all the records:

$alreadyVoted = false;
foreach ($allVotes as $vote){
    if ($vote->getAttribute('ip')==$ip){
        $alreadyVoted = true;
        break;
    }
}

if($alreadyVoted) {
    $s.="&msg= Already Voted";
    echo $s;
}
else {
    // other stuff
}

Why you should not do it this way

Storing your data in XML like this is a really inefficient way of doing things. You should move the data store to a database (MySql is typically easiest to set up and work with from PHP).