Random XML

[Anon]

How can I randomly access data from an XML document? For example, the root is QUOTES, the children elements are QUOTE, and each child element has TEXT and SOURCE. I want to have a clean list of quotes in XML form and randomly display one on my Web page using PHP. Thanks in advance for your help!

[btubalinal]

Warning: I wrote this code of the top of my head. I believe this will work, however, i couldn't test it because my php (v. 4.1.0) is installed on Windows 2000 and the DOMXML extension doesn't work on Windows.

$xmlfile = "quotes.xml";

//parse the xml file and return the DOM object.
$dom = xmldocfile($xmlfile);

if(!$dom) {
print('Error parsing xml file.');
exit;
}

//get the children of the root node (all the quote nodes in quotes)
$root = $dom->root();
$all_quotes = $root->children();

//pick a random number from 0 to however many quotes there are.
mt_srand((double)microtime() * 1000000);
$i = mt_rand(0, sizeof($all_quotes));

//Use the random number to get the quote.
$quote = $all_quotes[$i];

//Go print out the text.
$nodes = $quote->children();
while($node = array_shift($nodes)) {
if($node->name == "TEXT") {
print("TEXT: $node->content");
}

if($node->name == "SOURCE") {
print("SOURCE: $node->content");
}

}

hope this helps you.

BT