Help! php and XML?

Riddledaxis

Hi,

I am having a real nightmare working with XML data.

I have the following code in my site:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" >
<head>
<title>Checker</title>
</head>
<body>
<form style="WIDTH: 433px; HEIGHT: 540px" action="https://partners.enta.net/xml/ADSLChecker.php" method="get" name="ADSLChecker">
Telephone No
<input name="PhoneNo">
<input type="submit" name="submit" value="Submit">
</form>
</body>
</html>

The form works great, and returns a page with an XML Tree full of information but I cannot seem to work out how I can use this XML data and display the sections that I need and in a more graphical way.

I am probably missing something really obvious and any help will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

bubblenut

Well, the data isn't really going to be much use straight to a user. You'd be better off reading it in with php and then parsing it. Have a look at below for an idea.

<?php
if(isset($_GET['PhoneNo'])) {
  $xml = file_get_contents(
    'https://partners.enta.net/xml/ADSLChecker.php?PhoneNo='.$_GET['PhoneNo']
  );
  $simplexml = new SimpleXMLElement($xml);
  foreach($simplexml as $key => $value) {
    echo($key . ' => ' . $value ."\n");
  }
}
?>
<form action="" method="get">
  <input type="text" name="PhoneNo" />
  <input type="submit">
</form>

Check out [man]simplxml[/man], [man]xml[/man] or [man]dom[/man] (in that order) for more info.

Riddledaxis

Thanks for the advice.

I have looked at the pages you suggested but they don't seem to deal with what I need.

The problem that I am having is that once the form has been submitted the server returns a page of XML data. I am struggling to see how I can capture this data that is being returned in the very user unfriendly XML tree format and change it into something more meaningful for the user.

All help and suggestions greatfully received.

bubblenut

Well that's what I'm doing. Rather than sending the user directly to the XML link, send them to a page which grabs the XML, parses it and outputs the bits you want outputted.

Another method would be to use XSLT and then just parse this against the XML file. Either way, you don't want to send the user directly to the XML file.