Question

So i’m working on a php script which passes information to a server using Curl and the POST method and then takes back information from that server in the form of XML.I then want to take this information and parse it into a readable format for the user.

I grab the information using curl and load it into a variable ($result) which i then want to load into simpleXML and store in the variable $routeinfo. However when I perform a var_dump($routeinfo) there doesn’t appear to be any data stored. I’ve confirmed that there is data present in $result by echoing it.

I also figured it may have been due to the XML not showing up in the browser when I echoed $result(but it is there if I check the source). Just to check though I used htmlentities but that causes a lot of errors because < is interpreted as it’s html equivalent. Anyway I’ve reached an impass and have logged quite a few hours implementing different suggestions to no avail. My code is below and I would appreciate any help that can be rendered.

<?php 
//retrieve form data in a variable
$input = $_POST['stopNo'] ;

//declare other variables needed
$api_key = 'xxxkey' ;
$api_id = 12345 ;
$url = 'url to send data to' ; 
$querystring = "appID=". $api_id . "&apiKey=" . $api_key . "&stopNo" . $input ;
$data = urlencode($url) ; 


//curl using

$ch = curl_init() ; 

//set up curl

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'urlsendingdatato');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, 'appID='.urlencode($api_id).'&apiKey=' .urlencode($api_key) . '&stopNo=' .urlencode($input) );
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1); 
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0 ) ; 
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_ENCODING, "UTF-8") ;
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_BINARYTRANSFER , TRUE) ;


//execute and gather info
$result = curl_exec($ch) ; 

//close connection
curl_close($ch) ;

//format data 
//ent at the moment serves no purpose doesn't render the information correctly
$ent = htmlentities($result);
$routeinfo = new SimpleXMLElement($result) ;

//print data
echo "<br> $result <br>" ; 
var_dump($routeinfo) ;


?> 

Answer 1

It seems that the problem is arising when the simpleXML object is created.
So you can try creating a new simpleXMLElement object with a well defined XML file. If that works that means the fetched xml file is not of proper format.

$xml="<?xml version='1.0'?><book><author>steve</author><price>200</price><name>Its my life</name></book>";
$test= new SimpleXMLElement($xml);
var_dump($test);

This works for me!

But generally if there is an xml parsing issue, simpleXMLElement throws a error . Did it return any error in your case? or maybe you have switched off error reporting (error_reporting(0); ).