Post Var and XML Madness

caphonic

Hi,

I have the following code:

while( list($k,$v) = each($HTTP_POST_VARS) ) {
$k1 = strtoupper ( $k );
$v1 = strtoupper ( $v );
$n = "$k1=$v1";
$data = eregi_replace ( "_", " ", $n );
}

The $HTTP_POST_VAR is a piece of XML sent from flash. When flash sends the XML it has no name so PHP tries to give it a name ($k) by taking the node name and the first attribute and turning into $k. The rest of the XML is turned into the value. This explains why I have used
$n = "$k1=$v1";
as it sorts out the XML back into its original format. So the variable $data contaons a string of XML which looks like this

$data = "<item name="blah" date="blah">";

I can then write this data to a text file using

$filename = "test.txt";
$fd = fopen($filename, "a+");
fputs($fd, $data);
fclose($fd);

So this way I can see that $data exists in the format I would expect.

However when I try to pass $data into an XML parsing function - nothing happens.

I know the XML parser works because if I explicitly declare $data to equal the xml (i.e. not getting it from the $HTTP_POST_VARS it parses it fine)

I do not understand this. Can someone please help me.

TIA

john

Anon

Try adding the following line to your ActionScript when constructing an XML object.

myXML.contentType = \\"text/xml\\";

HTH

Heidi

bfehring

Heidi's suggestion should work, but watch out for a security problem with your script.. make sure to write test.txt in a directory not writeable to the public to ensure that a malicious script cant be sent up into $HTTP_POST_VARS['y'] and then executed by a faulty apache cgi configuration.

danludwig

Ignore this reply, I am just testing to see why there are 3 backslashes escaping the quotes on Heidi's reply. Macromedia's site says to set the contentType property to "type/subtype" at http://www.macromedia.com/home/searchresults/?sp-k=&sp-p=any&sp-a=00050d14-sp00000001&sp-q=xml.contenttype&Go.x=13&Go.y=5 but I know if I see 3 slashes in front of my reply, they're not really supposed to be there...

danludwig

After unsuccessfully trying to make PHP write XML to an external file, I commented out Heidi's "contentType" property declaration suggestion in the ActionScript and voila -- it worked fine. Also, when setting attributes for an XML element, I had to add a stripslashes($data) to get rid of escaped double quotes in the XML file. For example:

no stripslashes():
<TAG attribute=\"value\" />

with stripslashes():
<TAG attribute="value" />

Hope this helps...

Anon

Thanks all. I took your code and made this function. Thought it might help someone down the road. I'm using it to grab a WDDX Packet Post from a Flash MX application.

function getXMLPacket($HTTP_POST_VARS){
while( list($k,$v) = each($HTTP_POST_VARS) ) {
$k1 = strtoupper ( $k );
$v1 = strtoupper ( $v );
$n = "$k=$v";
$data = eregi_replace ( "_", " ", $n );
}
$data = str_replace('\"', '"', $data);
return $data;
}

// deserialize ServerPacket
$ServerPacketSend = getXMLPacket($HTTP_POST_VARS);