Is there anyway to make simpleXML work on web host.

Question

    <?php
$twitter_url = 'http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/ishrikrishna.xml?count=1';

$buffer = file_get_contents($twitter_url);

$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($buffer);

$status = $xml -> status;

$tweet =  $status -> text;

echo $tweet;

?>

I used this code to fetch tweets and it works successfully on localhost but not on my webhost, I tried this script on two webhosting services.

The problem i've noticed is that functions like file_get_contents(), simplexml_load_file() failed to fetch data from xml file(ex. rss files) stored on another server.

is there any solution's u know. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I believe this means you have the fopen URL wrappers turned off. See http://www.php.net/manual/en/filesystem.configuration.php#ini.allow-url-fopen You will probably not be able to turn these on if you are using a shared web server.

You may be able to use cURL to fetch remote pages instead:

$ch = curl_init('http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/ishrikrishna.xml?count=1');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$buffer = curl_exec($ch);

This will only work you have the cURL extension installed and enabled on your webhost.

See the PHP cURL documentation: http://www.php.net/manual/en/book.curl.php

Edit: corrected curl_setopt call

Answer 2

SimpleXML is new in PHP 5. I think almost all webhosts have PHP 5 installed, but in case your host is still using PHP 4 that may be the reason your script isn't working.