XML Parser

moracom

I have two pages.

Page 1: just contains the form with a method=get and two text fields.

Page 2: has the xml parser and it works just find as it retrieves the xml results in HTML format.

Page 2 Code:

<?php 

$file = "http://www.somesite.com/xml_api?q=" . $_GET["q"] . "&l=" . $_GET["l"] . ""; 

function contents($parser, $data){ 
    echo $data; 
} 

function startTag($parser, $data){ 
    echo "<b>"; 
} 

function endTag($parser, $data){ 
    echo "</b><br />"; 
} 

$xml_parser = xml_parser_create(); 

xml_set_element_handler($xml_parser, "startTag", "endTag"); 

xml_set_character_data_handler($xml_parser, "contents"); 

$fp = fopen($file, "r"); 

$data = fread($fp, 80000); 

if(!(xml_parse($xml_parser, $data, feof($fp)))){ 
    die("Error on line " . xml_get_current_line_number($xml_parser)); 
} 

xml_parser_free($xml_parser); 

fclose($fp); 

?>

The problem is that i want to manipulate some of the xml tags being retrieved. For example one of the xml tags is a URL and i want to hyperlink it with a <a href..> tag but on the code above i dont know how to find that xml tag. I know that the xml tag for the URL is <url>sometext</url>.
Please help me figure this out. Thanks!

mblack0508

Not sure if you thought about it, but have you considered using simplexml?

simplexml is great for doing small xml work, if you're only trying to get data and use it.

Lets say for example you have an xml of

<books>
   <book isbn="somenumber">
      <title>Book 1</title>
      <author>someguy</author>
   </book>
   <book isbn="secondnumber">
       <title> book 2</title>
       <author>someone  else</author>
    </book>
</books>

then with simplexml you could take that and do this

$xml = simplexml_load_file("http://www.example.com/books.xml");

foreach($xml->book as $book) {
   echo "Title: " . (string)$book->title . "\n";
   echo "Author: " . (string)$book->author . "\n";
   echo "ISBN: " . (string)$book["isbn"] . "\n";
}

Weedpacket

The stream XML parser is good for reading (potentially large) XML documents and perhaps building up an internal representation of part of it; but for manipulating document (e.g., locate all <url> elements and replace them with <a> elements), the [man]DOM[/man] is perhaps more appropriate. In fact, it can also be good just for reading, too, if the XML isn't vast. $urls = $doc->getElementsByTagName('url') and there's your list of <url> elements.