PHP and XML

Napster

How can I use PHP to retrieve data from an XML file? Thanks in advance.

planetsim

Doesnt appear you have done much research into this topic. [man]simpleXML[/man] for PHP 5, [man]xml[/man] should help you get started as well as doing a board search.

Napster

Could I possibly get the source code for an xml page, then use preg match to mine it?

justsomeone

you certainly can use preg match as you suggest. XML is just text. The question is, are you doing this cause it's the right thing to do for the project, or because you can't be bothered to learn to use an XML parser?

Napster

Well 1, I do not know XML. I never understood what it was really used for. Secondly, I may not be able to use simpleXML because it needs PHP5 and thirdly, I am using this to retrieve the current cost of sending packages.

justsomeone

I didn't mean you to convince me of the correctness of your decision, just for you to consider when deciding the course of action.

IIRC, PHP version 4 has support for XML parsing, check out the manual.

If it's overkill for what you are doing, fair enough. You be the judge. If you only want to extract one field from a page of XML text, you may be right to go with a simple pattern match. It may be faster to develop and faster to run.

But if this system grows over time, so that you are extracting another field, and another field and another field, and the XML layout changes, etc etc... then you'll end up effectively extending and extending your code until you've built an XML handler from scratch, which (with all due respect to you) probably won't be as robust as a mature XML parser designed as an XML parse from day one, with significant peer review and battle scars incorporated into it.

The choice, as ever, is yours.