php dynamic xml reading problem

anarchitecton

Hello.

I'm building this php navigation menu class that reads its contents from an xml file. I never had trouble 'freading' a static xml but now I'm trying to use a php dynamically generated xml as the menu source.

xml.php source:

<?php 
header("Content-type: text/xml");

$xml = "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"utf-8\"?>\n";
$xml .= "<content file=\"main.php\">\n";
$xml .= "	<item name=\"Home\" file=\"home.php\" />\n";
$xml .= "</content>\n";

print utf8_encode($xml);
?>

reader source:

<?php
$content = "";
$fd = fopen("xml.php", "r" );
while(!feof($fd)) $content .= fread($fd, 4096);
fclose( $fd );

print $content;
?>

Unfortunately I get the source of the php script itself instead of the xml output. I wanted to avoid having to write the xml string on the same page of xml menu class

Would you be so kind to tell me how can I retrieve the output of an external php script instead of its source? Thank you very much.

Kind regards,
Tiago

madwormer2

Well, in order to get it parsed, it needs to go through PHP, not the filesystem.

You could do this in many ways, example 1:

$content = file_get_contents('http://localhost/path/to/xml.php'); // Load it from your webserver.

Example 2 (output buffering):

ob_start();
include('xml.php');
$content = ob_get_contents();
ob_end_clean();

I'd use example 2, although you'll probably have to suppress the errors cause by the header(); (although you can easily code round this by editing the xml.php file.)

anarchitecton

thank you!

example #1 works ONLY if I use the full server path ['http://localhost...], as you mentioned. Why can't it work with 'xml.php' as path instead?

example #2 returns an empty file with following error: "XML Parsing Error: no element found".

cheers,
T.

madwormer2

anarchitecton wrote:
Why can't it work with 'xml.php' as path instead?

Madwormer2 wrote:
Well, in order to get it parsed, it needs to go through PHP, not the filesystem.

As I said before, you don't want it to be read by the filesystem, which is what is happening when you want it to open the file, it's just opening the PHP file from the filesystem.

Also, the reason for the error in example 2 is probably because of the use of header(), or something else, causing errors. Echo out $contents to see what it is returning.

anarchitecton

go it. thanks.