html data to XML form

[Anon]

I'm doing a class assignment and what I'd like to propose is having an html form a user can fill in with their browser, when then click SUBMIT the data gets sent to the web server and put into an XML document that can later be viewed or used on other systesm (like a Mac, Linux, etc).

A friend told me the process would be;
html form data
goes to PHP script on web server
PHP script launches an XML parser
data gets written to XML document.

I'm not a programmer, but is this feasabile? And if possible, could someone explain it in laymen's terms? What would the PHP script look like and do? Which parser (he said to use DOM), how would it be invoked, and how would it grab the data and know where to put it in the XML form?

Lastly, do the name/values fields in the HTML form have to match the same tags as the XML document?

Thanks.

[Anon]

Your friend is correct, but you don't have to do all of that. The easiest way is to have your submitted data put into a flat file with XML tags.

Lets say that you wanted first, middle and last names of a person. Your HTML would gather each of these as a separate input field. In your PHP script all you would need to do is create a file and put the information into it in whatever fashion you want.

So you PHP script would just have to output a file that looks like this:

<?xml>
<first_name>John</first_name>
<middle_name>Q</middle_name>
<last_name>Public</last_name>
</xml>

And save that file for export. You don't need to worry about parsers at all. DOM could make the process easier, but with something this simple it shouldn't be needed.

[Anon]

Thanks for the info. But what if I want to change the HTML form, then I'll have to update the PHP/XML information too.

If I use a parser, can it create the XML tags on the fly based on the HTMl data sent to it?

If I wanted to use PHP/DOM, is there a class already built in to PHP for this? I"ve seen DOM used in Java (at my course), but not PHP.

Thanks.