[RESOLVED] Parse data from response

mikawhat

I'm getting the following http response and i was wondering how i could extract the returned parameters:

<RESP CONC='false'>
<SEQ='0' MID='XXXX' STA='OK'>
</RESP>
OK

I need to get MID & STA values.

Thanks!

bradgrafelman

Is that the entire body of the response? Where is this data coming from? (And does that API have some sort of documentation, e.g. one that might offer tips on parsing the data it outputs?)

The reason I ask is because it's almost parsable as XML data... but not quite. As such, you'd have to resort to either a) implementing your own data parser, or b) resort to using regular expressions (e.g. using [man]preg_match/man).

For the latter, you could do something like:

@<[^/][^>]*MID='([^']*)'[^>]*STA='([^']*)'@

Note that if they aren't guarenteed to appear in that order (MID before STA), then you'd have to either a) break it out into two separate expressions, or b) make one big ugly one like:

@<[^/][^>]*(?:MID='([^']*)'[^>]*STA='([^']*)')|(?:STA='([^']*)'[^>]*MID='([^']*)')@

mikawhat

Thanks for all the details. Yes, this is the entire body of the response. This is a response from an http request and unfortunatelly the api documentation doesn't help.

I've tried using an xml parser but unfortunatelly i'm getting lots of errors and nothing helpful.

I thought too that preg_match would be the only solution, but i don't have the knowledge to create the appropriate expression. I've tried your first suggestion and it looks like it returns what i need, so i guess my problem solved.

P.S. You said that this is almost parsable as xml. What's wrong with it and it can't be parsed as html.

bradgrafelman

There are two problems with the data you gave that prevent it from being parsed as XML, and both are caused by this line:

<SEQ='0' MID='XXXX' STA='OK'>

The problems are:

That's just a bunch of attributes surrounded by angle brackets <>. There's no name for that entity.
Because there's no name, there's also no way to end/close that entity.

Now, if that instead read:

<some_name_here SEQ='0' MID='XXXX' STA='OK'/>

then you could use something like the [man]SimpleXML[/man] parser:

$string = <<<XML
<RESP CONC='false'>
<some_name_here SEQ='0' MID='XXXX' STA='OK'/>
</RESP>
XML;

$xml = simplexml_load_string($string); 
print_r($xml);

output:

SimpleXMLElement Object
(
    [@attributes] => Array
        (
            [CONC] => false
        )

[some_name_here] => SimpleXMLElement Object
    (
        [@attributes] => Array
            (
                [SEQ] => 0
                [MID] => XXXX
                [STA] => OK
            )

    )

)

mikawhat

Thank you so much for the solution and the explanation!