Reading external XML and outputting various fields

cainy1982

Hello all,

Im trying to work out if its possible for a user to enter a postcode and based on the postcode I display a ward.

Heres how I was proposing to do it,

Standard form that asks for user postcodes

Once the postcode is entered php sends off request to http://openlylocal.com/areas/postcodes/fy8%201bg.xml

PHP reads teh XML and extracts the field <name>Fairhaven</name> and displays it in a page.

I dont want someonne to write the code (but feel free to do so) just kick me in the right direction, I was thinking about using SimpleXML to load the external URL, then i couldnt work out how to bring back a single field only look the whole XML.

I was usng the example below as the basis for the work;

<?php
$xml = simplexml_load_file("test.xml");

echo $xml->getName() . "<br />";

foreach($xml->children() as $child)
  {
  echo $child->getName() . ": " . $child . "<br />";
  }
?>

Which is using the XMl below as an example

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<note>
<to>Tove</to>
<from>Jani</from>
<heading>Reminder</heading>
<body>Don't forget me this weekend!</body>
</note>

johanafm

cainy1982;10986020 wrote:
PHP reads teh XML and extracts the field <name>Fairhaven</name> and displays it in a page.

You only need to compare each postcode (assuming there is such a field) until you find the right one. I'd also wrap this in a function so that the entire xml element containing name, postcode etc is retrieved.

<?php
$xml = simplexml_load_file("test.xml");

function getElementByPostcode($xml, $code)
{

foreach($xml->children() as $child)
{
	if ($child->getPostcode() == $code)
		return $child;
}
return false;
}

if ($el = getElementByPostcode($xml, $code_input))
	echo $el->getName();
else
	printf('No node found for postcode %s', $code_input);

But you might want to look into DOMDocument instead which lets you use XPath, or DOMXPath as the actual class is called in this case.

$els = $xp->query(
	sprintf('//postcode[text()="%s"]/parent::node()', $code_input)
);

Where $xp is a DOMXpath object tied to your DOMDocument.
//postcode matches any element called "postcode", regardless of where it is in the hierarchy, [text()="..."] further restricts this matching to postcode nodes for which the text matches what is given, and finally /parent::node() selects the parent node of all postcode elements where the text matched.

That's what I'm guessing your after anyway.

cainy1982

Thanks for your reply,

I think I need to be a little clearer, I’m trying to get values from an external XML feed, I understand how to get every value from the XML, I just one a single field form rather than the entire XML.

I think that makes sense