Steam Feed and PHP Loop problems

[Sam_Tassell]

Hey guys,

I'm fairly new to PHP but i know the basics. I've been working with the Steam XML feeds for various reasons and i'm trying to create a list of friends that show whether they are online/offline, show their profile pic... etc...

To get a persons friends list (using me as an example) is: http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197970734089/friends?xml=1

But to get to get more information from the friends you take the steamID from the above XML and take information from their main profile XML feed, i have to do this because the normal profile XML (again as me as an example): http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197970734089?xml=1 , only displays 6 friends details at a time.

I hope you under stand but please see my PHP below, the problem i'm having is that it takes forever to run the loop and certain mobile browsers just wont display the page (timeout). I didn't know whether you guys being the phpfreaks would know of a faster memory efficient way of doing this?

  // set the XML file name as a PHP string
  $friendslist = "http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197970734089/friends/?xml=1" ; 

  // load the XML file 
  $xml = @simplexml_load_file($friendslist) or die ("no file loaded") ; 

  // get the output
  $steamID = $xml->steamID ;
  echo "<h1>Main Profile: " . $steamID . "</h1>";

  // set the loop
  foreach ($xml->friends->children() as $friendid) {
  echo "http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/".$friendid."?xml=1" ;
  echo "<br />";
  $friendget = "http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/".$friendid."?xml=1" ;
  $friendgot = @simplexml_load_file($friendget) or die ("no file loaded") ;
  echo $friendgot->steamID ;
  echo "<br />" ;
  }

[PradeepKr]

Found your problem 🙂

Reason:
Your script was getting halted while downloading xml file from "http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197966374919?xml=1"
This xml has some weird characters, may be non ASCII, non printable or whatever.

Solution:
The thing is you should download files with some timeout set (especially in loops). Skip the iteration where time taken is unacceptable.

Check set time out while downloading files to know about different ways of setting timeout options in PHP.

I modified your code, update it wherever need be,

<?php

$friendslist = "http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197970734089/friends/?xml=1" ;

if(!$xml_str = check_url($friendslist))
{
  echo "XML file not found";    

  exit;
}

if(! $xml = simplexml_load_string($xml_str) )
{
  echo "File not loaded";
  exit;
}

$steamID = $xml->steamID ;

echo "<h1>Main Profile: " . $steamID . "</h1>";

$count = 1;
$limit = 100;
foreach ($xml->friends->children() as $friendid) 
{
  if($count>$limit)  // more friends more laziness :)
    break;

  $count++;

  if( ! isclean($friendid) ) // clean it since it is kind of user input
  {
    echo "Invalid id for child $friendget ";    

    continue;
  }

  $friendget = "http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/".$friendid."?xml=1" ;
  $xml_str = ""; //empty it for every iteration
  if(!$xml_str = check_url($friendget))
  {
    echo "XML file not found for child $friendget ";    

    continue;
  }
  if(! $friendgot = @simplexml_load_string($xml_str) )
  {
    echo "File not loaded for child $friendget  ";
    continue;
  }

  echo $friendgot->steamID ;
  echo "<br />" ;
} 

///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
function isclean($friendid)    //make it your way
{
  echo  "checking |$friendid| ", is_int($friendid); 
  if( is_int($friendid) || is_float($friendid) )   //is_int() alone fails. Limited to the word size of the environment php is running in  

    return true;
  else
    return false;  

}
function check_url($url) {
   $c = curl_init();
   curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
   curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);         // dont get the header   

   //curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_BINARYTRANSFER, false); // TRUE to return the raw output when CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER is used. 
   //curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_TRANSFERTEXT, true); // TRUE to use ASCII mode for FTP transfers. For LDAP, it retrieves data in plain text instead of HTML. On Windows systems, it will not set STDOUT to binary mode. 
   curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1); // to get the result as a string
   curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_FRESH_CONNECT,  1); // don't use a cached version of the url
   curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 1); //The number of seconds to wait while trying to connect. Use 0 to wait indefinitely.
   curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 2);        //The maximum number of seconds to allow cURL functions to execute.   

   if (!$xml = curl_exec($c)) 
   {
      $errmsg  = curl_error( $c );
      echo "Error: cURL $errmsg <br>";
      return ;
   }
   return $xml;
}
?>

[PradeepKr]

BTW. Why are you hardcoding the tag names. It will not be portable. Use softcoding technic for XML Parsing by using XML DOM object.

Check some the ways for xml parsing in php here.