Sorting and limiting PHP table results.

deltalooper

Hey All,

I'm still getting the hang of PHP with XML and I am working with both to create stat snippets for my league website using XML data provided by our stat provider. I have managed to populate a table and list for my baseball leagues pitching leaders using test data from another league that uses the same provider. But now I'm trying to sort that list by the number of "wins" and limit the results to the top 10 players in PHP and I am stuck. Being new to all of this I know it's something I have not yet learned. Can someone help with this?

This is the parsed list:
http://nyriptide.com/z2z-sites/nycmbl_site/ps_php/test2.php

This is the raw data stream:
http://www.pointstreak.com/baseball/api/index.php?action=league_pitchingleaders&seasonid=130&leagueid=130

This is the PHP Code I wrote:

<style type="text/css">
table.ex1 {border-spacing: 0}
table.ex1 td, th {padding: 0 0.2em}
table.ex1 tr:nth-child(odd) {color: #000; background: #FFFFFF}
table.ex1 tr:nth-child(even) {color: #000; background: #E5E5E5}

</style><?php 
$file = 'http://www.pointstreak.com/baseball/api/index.php?action=league_pitchingleaders&seasonid=130&leagueid=130';
$xmlstr = file_get_contents($file);

$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($xmlstr);

echo '<table border="1" width="200" id="table2" style="border-collapse: collapse" bordercolor="#808080">
	<tr>
		<td align="center" bgcolor="#808080" width="30"><b>
		<font face="Arial" size="1" color="#FFFFFF">#</font></b></td>
		<td align="center" bgcolor="#808080" width="100"><b>
		<font face="Arial" size="1" color="#FFFFFF">PITCHER</font></b></td>
		<td align="center" bgcolor="#808080" width="35"><b>
		<font face="Arial" size="1" color="#FFFFFF">TEAM</font></b></td>
		<td align="center" bgcolor="#808080" width="35"><b>
		<font face="Arial" size="1" color="#FFFFFF">WINS</font></b></td>
	</tr></table>';

echo '<table class=ex1 border="0" width="200" id="table1" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">';
foreach($xml->sho->pitcher as $div){
	echo '<tr>'; 
    echo '<td align="center" width="30"><font face="Arial" size="1" color="#000000">' . $div->jersey[0] . '</font></td>';
	echo '<td width="100"><font face="Arial" size="1" color="#000000">' . $div->playername[0] . '</font></td>';
	echo '<td align="center" width="35"><font face="Arial" size="1" color="#000000">' . $div->teamname[0] . '</font></td>';
	echo '<td align="center" width="35"><font face="Arial" size="1" color="#000000">' . $div->wins[0] . '</font></td>';
	echo '</tr>';
}
echo '</table>';

johanafm

With your approach, you'd have to first loop over all appropriate elements for your "wins" data and sort that. Then go over this resulting data set and output the first 10. Or, you could do a transformation of the xml with XSLT.

deltalooper

Hey johanafm,

Thanks for the advice. Since I'm new to this not sure exactly what you mean or how to do it but I will try looking it up in google to see what I come up with.

johanafm

Here you loop over the result set and output data

foreach($xml->sho->pitcher as $div){
    echo '<tr>';
    echo '<td align="center" width="35"><font face="Arial" size="1" color="#000000">' . $div->wins[0] . '</font></td>';
    echo '</tr>';
}

If you instead somehow first collected your data in a sortable way

foreach($xml->sho->pitcher as $div){
	/* can't use: $pitcher[$div->wins[0]] = $div if there can be more than one pitcher with
	 * same amount of wins */
	$pitchers_by_wins[$div->wins[0]][] = $div;
}

And then sorted it before outputting the desired number of rows

// sort in reverse (descending) order
krsort($pitcher_by_wins);
$count = 0;
foreach($pitcher_by_wins as $pitchers) {
	foreach($pitchers as $div) {
		++$count;
		// your existing output code here
	}
	if ($count == 10)
		break;
}

XSLT is a viable alternative, but it also pretty much is a requirement that you learn to understand XPath. Google for tutorials or start by reading their entries in wikipedia. Not sure what the quality of the wiki subjects are, but going straight to the specifications at w3.org might not be an ideal introduction to the subject. w3schools.com may have something on the topic though.

deltalooper

Hey Johannafm,

I listened to your advice and I formatted everything in XSL and it came out really nice and I managed to get all the parameters I was looking for. My new problem is that the XML data is not my own data. It's being referenced from data on another server and everything I read tells me to link the xsl sheet into the XML file.

Since this is not my file and is being rendered from a remote source I am not sure how to get this data onto my site.

deltalooper

hahahha I think we were writing responses to each other at the same time. I will try the other method you just gave me as well and look up xpath.

johanafm

If you have php configured to allow http file wrappers, then file_get_contents('http://example.com/xml_file') will give you the xml as a string, which you can use with DOM, XSLTProcessor etc.
Or use simple string functions to include your own style sheet in the original XML and send that to the browser which will then handle the xsl transformation.