file parsing/XML/mySQL

[Anon]

Hi all,

I'm having to have my first stab at parsing XML/txt files today, and I'm getting a bit lost in it all.

I've got one file with a format like this:

<person>
<firstname>...</firstname>
<secondname>...</secondname>
<email>...</email>
</person>

With about 500 of these records - with the only small issue being that some tags (e.g. <mobile>) can be present or not, and a NULL value needs to go into the db in that case.

All I need to do is draw out that info from the XML file, and push it into a mySQL dB. I'm having trouble finding any help on doing this, either by parsing the XMl file, or by running a big reg. exp.

Can somebody help me out? I'm sure there's a really simple way to do this, but I'm a bit lost.

Thanks in advance,

Kerin

[znouza]

take a look at
http://phpbuilder.com/columns/joe20000907.php3

[Anon]

I have found the XMLDom functions in PHP 4 do actually work, but I found them difficult to work with. I wrote a wrapper class to make them a little easier.

<?
class clsXML {
var $lXML;

function clsXML() {
    //$this->lXML = xmldoc("");
    $this->lXML = new_xmldoc("1.0");
}

function loadFile($File) {
    $this->lXML = xmldocfile( $File ); 
}
function get_content($parent)
{
    $nodes = $parent->children();
    while($node = array_shift($nodes))
        if ($node->type == XML_TEXT_NODE)
            return $node->content;
    return "";
}
function root() {
    return $this->lXML->root();
}
function get_content($parent)
{
    $nodes = $parent->children();
    while($node = array_shift($nodes))
        if ($node->type == XML_TEXT_NODE)
            return $node->content;
    return "";
}
function find_content($parent,$name)
{
    $nodes = $parent->children();
    while($node = array_shift($nodes))
        if ($node->name == $name)
            return get_content($node);
    return "";
}
function selectSingleNode($parent, $nodename) {
    $nodes = $parent->children();
    while ($node = array_shift($nodes)) 
    {
        if ($node->name == $nodename) {
            return $node;
        }
    }
}

function selectNodes($parent, $nodename) {
    $nodes = $parent->children();
    $a = array();
    while ($node = array_shift($nodes)) 
    {
        if ($node->name == $nodename) {
            array_push($a, $node);
        }
    }
    return $a;
}

}

With this class (I did not include all of it), you can use the following code to process your XML:

$XML->loadFile("MYFILE.XML");
$nCMD = $XML->root();

$nlPER = $XML->selectNodes($nCMD, "person");
while ($nPER = array_shift($nlPER)) {
$firstname = $XML->find_content($nPER, "firstname")

//do SQL stuff here
}