Simple question re: passing arrays

KAS

I am very new to php, xml, DOM, ... so I am sure this is a very basic question. Please bear with me.

In one php page, I have this code...
<cotd mid="<?=$POST['mid']?>" date="<?=date('c',$day)?>" msg="<?=$errmsg?>" img="<?=$POST['img']?>" />

The result of the above code is that int he XMLrequest stucture in the XMLresponse field, I have 1 node - cotd with 4 attributes - mid, date, msg, img

Now here is my problem. Now I need to send an array in the XMLrequest stucture. My array is 10 items each with three fields. If I do this
<cotd chefs="<?=$randchefs?>" />
The array does not pass through.

Can somebody give me some advice as to how to pass the array such that it ends up in the XMLresponse structure?

NogDog

You could use serialize() to convert the array into a string, then unserialize() to convert it back into an array. However, that would not be within the intended spirit of XML, since it would make the XML useless for any application that is not a PHP application.

For the resulting XML to be truly portable, you would have to extract the information in the array into separate XML elements that are child nodes to the node in question. Perhaps something like:

<cotd mid="<?php echo $_POST['mid']?>" date="<?php echo date('c',$day)?>" msg="<?php echo $errmsg?>" img="<?php echo $_POST['img']?>">
<?php
foreach($randchefs as $chef)
{
  echo "<chef";
  foreach($chef as $key => $val)
  {
    echo " $key=\"$val\"";
  }
  echo " />\n";
}
?>
</cotd>

KAS

That's really what you need to do huh? I thought of that but it seemed so 'brute force'. So, I guess there is really no provision for passing arrays intact huh?

Thanks for the help.

NogDog

KAS wrote:
That's really what you need to do huh? I thought of that but it seemed so 'brute force'. So, I guess there is really no provision for passing arrays intact huh?

Thanks for the help.

I suppose you could convert it into some sort of delimited text string and use that string as an attribute value, but that just seems kind of ugly to me. 🙂

bradgrafelman

NogDog wrote:
I suppose you could convert it into some sort of delimited text string and use that string as an attribute value

You mean like what [man]serialize/man does? :p

Anyway... you could start a session, and store the array in the session. Then again, behind the scenes, the server is doing the same thing - serializing the array as data and storing it on its hard drive. Either way, I don't see what's wrong with this method of storing/passing arrays.