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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-06T04:55:02+00:00

This is my first time using XML documents. What I’m trying to do is

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This is my first time using XML documents. What I’m trying to do is extract some information from a spotify search. e.g. this page: Spotify Results

I’m not that good with scoping, everything I know so far has been from tutorials.

What I want the end results to look like is somthing like this:

(Album Name) - (Artist Name) (year)

(track number) - (Track Name) - (length)
(track number) - (Track Name) - (length)
(track number) - (Track Name) - (length)
...

Here is the code I have so far. 

<?php
 function print_r2($val){
        echo '<pre>';
        print_r($val);
        echo  '</pre>';
}

$URL = "http://ws.spotify.com/lookup/1/?uri=spotify:album:77Tgq2oSMvgP4Y9pBVKRJa&extras=trackdetail";

$xml = simplexml_load_file($URL) 
   or die("Error: Cannot create object");

//print_r2($xml);

foreach($xml->children() as $album){
    echo($album->name);
    echo($album->artist->name);
    echo($album->released);

    foreach($album->children() as $track => $data){
      echo $data->{'track-number'};
      echo("  -  ");
      echo $data->name;
      echo("  -  ");
      echo $data->length;
      echo "<br />";
    }
}

?>

The Problem that I’m having is the Artist Name and Year is not showing, and also it’s putting in more ” – ” then there needs to be. (guessing it has something to do with children() but not outputting any data.)

Also, I was thinking about having this information saved into an array and processing that data into a SQL database. If you know of a better way of writing it with the array that would be awesome. (kill two birds with one stone).

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    A Super simple way to parse XML to a workable array is like so:

    <?php 
$xml = file_get_contents('http://ws.spotify.com/lookup/1/?uri=spotify:album:77Tgq2oSMvgP4Y9pBVKRJa&extras=trackdetail');

//Type cast XML into Array
$a = json_decode(json_encode((array) simplexml_load_string($xml)),1);

//See the full array
//print_r($a);

echo $a['name'].' - '.$a['artist']['name'].' - '.$a['released'].'<br />'.PHP_EOL;

foreach($a['tracks']['track'] as $track){
    echo $track['track-number'].' - '.$track['name'].' - '.secondsToTime($track['length']).'<br />'.PHP_EOL;
}

/*
Be Lifted High - Bethel Live - 2011<br />
1 - You Are Good (feat. Brian Johnson) - 4m25s<br />
2 - One Thing Remains (feat. Brian Johnson) - 5m0s<br />
3 - Furious (feat. Jeremy Riddle) - 5m16s<br />
4 - Be Lifted High (feat. Brian Johnson) - 6m54s<br />
5 - God I Look To You (feat. Jenn Johnson) - 7m32s<br />
6 - I Will Exalt (feat. Amanda Falk) - 6m44s<br />
7 - What Would I Have Done (feat. Brian Johnson and Jenn Johnson) - 6m13s<br />
8 - Hope's Anthem (feat. William Matthews) - 5m45s<br />
9 - Love Came Down (feat. Brian Johnson) - 5m6s<br />
10 - Deep Cries Out (feat. William Matthews) - 5m14s<br />
11 - God Of The Redeemed (feat. Jeremy Riddle) - 6m8s<br />
12 - Forever And A Day (feat. Jenn Johnson) - 7m5s<br />
13 - One Thirst (feat. Jeremy Riddle and Steffany Frizzell) - 7m5s<br />
*/

function secondsToTime($seconds){
     // minutes
    $divisor_for_minutes = $seconds % (60 * 60);
    $minutes = floor($divisor_for_minutes / 60);

    // seconds
    $divisor_for_seconds = $divisor_for_minutes % 60;
    $seconds = ceil($divisor_for_seconds);

    // return the final song len string
    return $minutes."m".$seconds."s";
}
?>
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