XML Import, Is there a script I could customize?

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XML Import, Is there a script I could customize?

dniezby

Sadly, I'm (re)new at coding. I haven't had to do any coding in years and BOY have things updated.

I need some help with something that doesn't look like it should be as difficult as I'm making it to be.

I have a pretty simple XML file that I need to pull data from and insert into two related tables.

Could someone help me? If I could just get a start on the code, I could write it.

This is the WHOLE file...Of course, the full report would be many more players but here it is.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?> 
 <Tournament Name="2013-10-15-1930-HOL" TournamentStartDate="2013-10-15 19:38:19" TournamentEndDate="2013-10-15 22:47:53" TournamentComments=""> 
 <Players> 
 <Player FirstName="Joe" LastName="Blow" Rank="35" TournamentPts="20" RoundOut="2" TimeOut="2013-10-15 19:57:51"/> 
 <Player FirstName="Summer" LastName="Sally" Rank="6" TournamentPts="170" RoundOut="10" TimeOut="2013-10-15 22:31:08"/> 
 </players> 
 </Tournament>

Tournament information needs to be pulled out and inserted into a table called, "myevents" and the player rows need to go to a table called, "event_results"

ANY HELP on how I could do this would be GREATLY appreciated. Once I get going, I learn fast. I know I'm making this harder than it needs to be.

NogDog

Have you looked at the [man]SimpleXML[/man] functions yet? ("Simple" is in the mind of the beholder in this case. ).

dalecosp

NogDog;11034325 wrote:
Have you looked at the [man]SimpleXML[/man] functions yet? ("Simple" is in the mind of the beholder in this case. ).

+1 for taking a look at that. Otherwise, it's [man]DOMDocument[/man], which is a bit tougher to use, but not impossible, either.

[EDIT]: I may have been thinking of Jose Solorzano's* simplehtmldom instead, though; not sure if it would apply to this (never tried it on XML), but I've found it to be extremely easy to use and great for some cases of reading HTML docs.

*Now maintained by someone else, I believe....

sneakyimp

I think step one would be to find out where you are retrieving your XML from. Are you fetching it from a remote location? Are you reading it from a file? I put it in a file called data.xml and then did this:

<?php
$xml_string = file_get_contents("data.xml");

$obj = new SimpleXMLElement($xml_string);

var_dump($obj->Tournament);
?>

I had to change the case of the first P in the closing </Players> tag to get it to parse but then the output indicates that SimpleXML fails to assign any of the Tournament's attributes:

object(SimpleXMLElement)#2 (0) {
}

You can get some access to the players like this though:

$xml_string = file_get_contents("data.xml");

$obj = new SimpleXMLElement($xml_string);


for($i=0; $i < 5; $i++) {
        echo "player " . $i . ": " . $obj->Players->Player[$i]["FirstName"] . "\n";
}

I think you might need to tweak your XML document's structure to play better with SimpleXML or use a more sophisticated tool.

dniezby

Yeah, that "P" was a typo. Eventually, I will be uploading the file and extracting the data. However, I COULD upload the file and store it as method of redundancy.

I found this code...

<?php


if (file_exists('test.xml')) {
    $xml = simplexml_load_file('test.xml');

print_r($xml);
} else {
    exit('Failed to open test.xml.');
}
?>

AND it created this output.

SimpleXMLElement Object ( [@attributes] => Array ( [Name] => 2013-10-15-1930-HOL [TournamentStartDate] => 2013-10-15 19:38:19 [TournamentEndDate] => 2013-10-15 22:47:53 [TournamentComments] => ) [Players] => SimpleXMLElement Object ( [Player] => Array ( [0] => SimpleXMLElement Object ( [@attributes] => Array ( [FirstName] => Joe [LastName] => Blow [Rank] => 35 [TournamentPts] => 20 [RoundOut] => 2 [TimeOut] => 2013-10-15 19:57:51 ) ) [1] => SimpleXMLElement Object ( [@attributes] => Array ( [FirstName] => Summer [LastName] => Sally [Rank] => 6 [TournamentPts] => 170 [RoundOut] => 10 [TimeOut] => 2013-10-15 22:31:08 ) ) ) ) )

I just don't know what to do with it.

I know it's giving me some idea of how to write the actual script but I just get more confused every time I read this part of PHP.

Thanks for all your help so far. I REALLY REALLY appreciate it.
-Dave

dniezby

@sneakyimp

I ran your code and my result was different.

object(SimpleXMLElement)[2]

Does that change anything?

And, sorry, but could you explain that FOR statement?
I don't understand part between ()...What does that represent?

sneakyimp

Weird that your result was different. Any idea what version of PHP you are running?

To be honest, I'm not entirely sure how to use the objects returned by these functions. It's sort of trial and error. $obj is going to be some object representing your xml. I would alternately try using var_dump on it and then based on what comes out, I would try object style notation to see if I can get it anything inside it:

var_dump($obj->Players); // is this an array? or another object?

If you happen to grab an array, you can use a FOR loop (or FOREACH) to loop through the items you have located.

The FOR statement I wrote sets the variable $i to 0, executes the code in brackets, and then increments the value of $i by one, and repeats until $i gets to five at which point it stops. I just picked 5 arbitrarily.

Weedpacket

dalescop wrote:
+1 for taking a look at that. Otherwise, it's DOMDocument, which is a bit tougher to use, but not impossible, either.

A distinct advantage of using the DOM is that it's standardised and there's a lot more information about on how to work with it - you're not limited to PHP reosurces.