[RESOLVED] Curl: Reading XML that's been sent to me?

[middleman666]

Hey All,

Attemping to build my first API and hit my first and probably most important bump...

The remote website will be sending XML to me via curl, using the following:

$xml = '<rqst>
	<customer user="joebloggs">
		<email>email_input</email>
		<firstname>firstname_input</firstname>
		<lastname>lastname_input</lastname>
		<address1>address1_input/address1>
		<address2>address2_input</address2>
		<towncity>towncity_input</towncity>
		<countyregion>countyregion_input</countyregion>
		<postcode>postcode_input</postcode>
		<country>country_input</country>
		<telephone>telephone_input</telephone>
		<mobile>mobile_input</mobile>
	</customer>
</rqst>';

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "https://api.domainname.com/createcustomer.php");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "domainname.com php version 0.1");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $xml);
$response = curl_exec ($ch);
curl_close ($ch);

But I'm not sure how to handle that at my end, how do I split up the posted XML so I end up with variables for each tag, customer, email, address1... etc. ?

Once I process the xml they send, I'll be reading out a sucess XML for them to use at their end.

Can anyone give me a kick in the right direction?

Thanks

[NogDog]

You could consider using the [man]DOM[/man] or [man]SimpleXML[/man] extensions. Also, the PEAR repository has all sorts of XML packages, such as XML_Parser.

[middleman666]

Hey NogDog,

Cheers for the reply and the links, think I'd like to use SimpleXML (the name says it all for me), but I'm still unsure of how to actually get the xml from the curl request in the first place and then start playing with it.

Is it as simple as this?:

$xml = $_POST['CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS'];

Thanks

[NogDog]

I'm not 100% sure we're on the same page here. My assumption was that the code you posted was what your script will be running, and that you are expecting to get some XML text back as a response. If so, that XML text would be contained in the $response variable, which would be what you would parse (via whichever method) to extract the data you're interested in.

However, on rereading your posts, I'm now not sure if that's what you're asking, or if you're asking how to write the script that would receive the XML data posted by that cURL code you showed us. 😕

[middleman666]

Sorry, thinking I'm confusing myself aswell.

The code I posted would be what the person sending me the xml is using, but what I want to know how to do is take the $xml they are sending.

So they send me the xml, I insert each tag value into a database or something, then return a success message in xml format which as you said, they could read and parse using the $response value.

Is there a way of doing that?

Thanks

[NogDog]

It gets a bit ugly if you use that cURL code exactly as is. However, it's easily fixed by using an array for the post data, assigning the key you want to use in the receiving script for the $POST array:

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, array('xml' => $xml));
//                                   ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Then in the receiving script, the XML would be in $_POST['xml'], which you could then parse with SimpleXML or whatever other method works best for you (I'm kind of partial to [man]DOM[/man], but I know a lot of people who prefer SimpleXML. Well, I lie a bit: for simple stuff where I just want to grab one or two values I often just use preg_match(). 😉 )

[middleman666]

That's awesome, just what I needed, bring on the parsing!

Thanks for your help!