parsing a dynamically generated XML feed

[thehedgehog]

I'm working on linking php up with a rather awkward ecommerce solution.

in order to retrieve product info and make transactions happen, XML info is submitted as a reqiest to an apache module, which returns its own XML document in response.

i've built a page that takes GET variables and submits them as POST data. I've also built an instance of php's parser object to read the resulting XML.

the problem is i can't get these two pages to talk to one another. the module changes the URL of the page when it responds, so fopen() returns an error, because the page it requested (which submits and retrieves the data), results in a different URL than what it first tried to open.

i then tried posting the data with javascript's XMLHttpRequest, but fopen() of course won't process that. making it an include() first of course doesn't help, since i can't assign the contents of include() to a variable.

i've no control over the module or its XML output, so i can't make it spit the whole thing out as a php variable, which would be ideal.

ultimately i'd like to get the response XML into a PHP string.

we're using PHP 4.3.

any ideas or thoughts would be severely appreciated.

[thehedgehog]

incidently this was eventually solved by upgrading to php5 and adding CURL support:

$post_string .= 'd=';
include('prefs.php');
$req = $_GET[file];
$data = file("{$baseUrl}/{$xmlDir}/$req.txt");
$passed_vars = array_keys($HTTP_GET_VARS);
for ($i=1; $i < count($data); $i++) {
     $match = preg_replace("/\<([a-zA-z]+[a-zA-Z_-]*)\>(.*)<\/([a-zA-z]+[a-zA-Z_-]*)\>/","$1",$data[$i]);  

     for($n=0; $n < count($passed_vars); $n++) {
         $retrv = $passed_vars[$n];
         if (strstr("$match","$retrv")) {
               $set = $_GET[$passed_vars[$n]];
               $data[$i] = preg_replace("/\<([a-zA-z]+[a-zA-Z_-]*)\>(.*)<\/([a-zA-z]+[a-zA-Z_-]*)\>/","<$1>$set</$3>",$data[$i]);     

         } else {
         }
     }
     $post_string .= $data[$i];
}
 $url = "{baseUrl}/{$xmlDir}/response.xml";
 $header .= "Content-type: text/xml";
 $ch = curl_init();
 curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$url);
 curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
 curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, $header);
 curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, TRUE);
 curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $post_string);
 $rdata = curl_exec($ch); 
 if (curl_errno($ch)) {
    print curl_errno($ch);
    print curl_error($ch);
} else {
    curl_close($ch);
}
$xml = simplexml_load_string($mydata);

the only required argument is $_GET[file], which opens a txt version of the xml to send. the regular expressions process the xml, and whenever a GET key matches one of the tags, it inserts the value between the named tag, submits the data to response.xml via CURL, then loads it all into a simplexml object.

no clue when this would actually be helpful to anyone other than what i'm using it for, but hey, who knows :]