[RESOLVED] Working with XML -nooblet area-

scrupul0us

OK... im gunna come right off the bat and say im pretty weak in the XML parsing area... and ive looked around a bit but applying existing examples havent seemed to prove much help

heres what im doing... php 5 btw...

i have a "small" amount of data that i decided to store in a xml since making a DB was over kill... its basically a bunch of services and is structured like this:

i have a bunch of categories, but thats the basic structure

what i need todo is this... im going to have the user click a link which will drive the query string (QS)... now based on the QS i want to parse this xml file out in a formatted way

if someone could just show me how to parse oput the data where a variable will equal the "category" tag that would help me tremendously

pseduo code:

$cat = $_GET['servce'];

parse xml data where <category> == $cat
{
<name>
<description>
<price>
}

like that...

thanks!

rincewind456

This is how I would do it, it may be of some use to you

<?php
$category = $_GET['service'];		//get the category
$xmlFileName = 'File.xml';	//assign the xml file name to a var
$xml = simplexml_load_file($xmlFileName);		//load the xml file
?>
<table width="60%" border="1">
<?php

foreach ($xml->$category->item as $item) {	//$category is where you assign the
	//category name if it were static then it would look like $xml->category->item as $item
	//loop through the xml file
	echo "<tr><td colspan='2'>".$item->name."</a></td>";
	echo "<td colspan='2'>".$item->description."</td><td>".$item->price."</td></tr>";
}
?>
</table>

scrupul0us

awesome... ill give it a try later today... thanks

scrupul0us

ok ive modified your code to reflect this:

<?php

if (isset($_GET['service']))
{
	//NEED STRUCTURE TO CHECK IF CAT EXISTS HERE
    $category = $_GET['service'];        //get the category
	$xmlFileName = 'includes/services.xml';    //assign the xml file name to a var
	$xml = simplexml_load_file($xmlFileName);        //load the xml file
	?>
		<table width="60%" border="1">
		<?php

	foreach ($xml->$category->item as $item) 
	{   //$category is where you assign the
		//category name if it were static then it would look like $xml->category->item as $item
		//loop through the xml file
		echo "<tr><td colspan='2'>".$item->name."</a></td>";
		echo "<td colspan='2'>".$item->description."</td><td>".$item->price."</td></tr>";
	}
	?>
	</table>
<?php 
}
else
{
echo "Nothing Selected";
} 
?>

now my question is, how can i check to see if a category exists? once the QS passes isset() i need some kind of check otherwise if someone fusses with the QS it will blow the page up if the "fussed" category doesn't exist

again just a code snippet to put me in the right direction would be helpful

im thinking like:

if ($cat in $xml->$category)
{
//check passed
}

thanks

rincewind456

Not knowing how the rest of your xml data structure is named, I would go for extracting the categories into an array then checking to see if they are present in it.

scrupul0us

i was thinking of using inarray() but i didnt know if there was a procedure built into the XML object... thanks

rincewind456

Well you can build the array dynamically by doing this

$xml =  SimpleXML_load_file('File.xml');
foreach ($xml->children() as $child){
echo $child->getName() . "\n";
}

scrupul0us

heres my final code

<?php
$xmlFileName = 'includes/services.xml';
$xml = simplexml_load_file($xmlFileName);

$validservices = array();
$i=0;

foreach($xml -> children() as $name => $node){
  $validservices[$i] = $name;
  $i++;
}

if (isset($_GET['service']))
{
$service = $_GET['service'];

if (in_array($service,$validservices))
{
?>
	<table width="60%" border="1">
	<?php

	foreach ($xml->$service->item as $item) 
	{   
		echo "<tr><td colspan='2'>".$item->name."</a></td>";
		echo "<td colspan='2'>".$item->description."</td>";
		echo "<td>".$item->price."</td></tr>";
	}
	?>
	</table>
<?php
}
else
{
echo "No Valid Service Selected";
} 
}
else
{
echo "No Query String Supplied";
}
?>

scrupul0us

thanks for all your help rince