How to echo xml file in php

Question

How to print an xml file to the screen in php?

This is not working:

$curl = curl_init();        
curl_setopt ($curl, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://rss.news.yahoo.com/rss/topstories');   
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);   
$result = curl_exec ($curl);   
curl_close ($curl);    
$xml = simplexml_load_string($result);
echo $xml;

Is there a simple solution? Maybe without SimpleXML?

Answer 1

Am I oversimplifying this?

$location = "http://rss.news.yahoo.com/rss/topstories";
print file_get_contents($location);

Some places (like digg.com) won't allow you to access their site without having a user-agent, in which case you would need to set that with ini_set() prior to running the file_get_contents().

Answer 2

You can use HTTP URLs as if they were local files, thanks to PHP's wrappers

You can get the contents from an URL via file_get_contents() and then echo it, or even read it directly using readfile()

$file = file_get_contents('http://example.com/rss');
echo $file;

or

readfile('http://example.com/rss');

Don't forget to set the correct MIME type before outputing anything, though.

header('Content-type: text/xml');

Answer 3

You can use the asXML method

echo $xml->asXML();

You can also give it a filename

$xml->asXML('filename.xml');

Answer 4

If you just want to print the raw XML you don't need Simple XML. I added some error handling and a simple example of how you might want to use SimpleXML.

<?php 
$curl = curl_init();        
curl_setopt ($curl, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://rss.news.yahoo.com/rss/topstories');   
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);   
$result = curl_exec ($curl);   

if ($result === false) {
    die('Error fetching data: ' . curl_error($curl));   
}
curl_close ($curl);    

//we can at this point echo the XML if you want
//echo $result;

//parse xml string into SimpleXML objects
$xml = simplexml_load_string($result);

if ($xml === false) {
    die('Error parsing XML');   
}

//now we can loop through the xml structure
foreach ($xml->channel->item as $item) {
    print $item->title;   
}