I need to get xml with php. How would I go about that?

Question

What is the best way?

Answer 1

SimpleXML and the PHP DOM are good bets.

Answer 2

By "get XML", do you mean retrieve it from a remote source, or parse a XML text that you already have?

For the former, either use PHP's built-in capability to load URL content (via the file_get_contents or similar functions applied to URLs), or use a library like cURL (which is included standard with most PHP distributions).

For the latter, libraries like SimpleXML (also included standard) can be quite useful.

Answer 3

Use SimpleXML. It turns an XML document into an object that provides structured access to the XML.

To create a SimpleXML object from an XML document stored in a string, pass the string to simplexml_load_string( ). It returns a SimpleXML object.

As an example consider this:

$channel =<<<_XML_
<channel>    
 <title>Example title</title>    
 <link>http://example.com/&lt;/link&gt;    
 <description>Example desccription</description>    
</channel>    
_XML_;
// The XML that needs to be parsed

$xml = simplexml_load_string($channel); // create a SimpleXML object.

print "The $xml->title channel is available at $xml->link. ";

will print:

The Example title is available at http://example.com/.

Answer 4

You can use the following program also for creating the SimpleXml object. Using SimpleXml object you can access the xml tags.

test.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<employee>

        <name> Shyam </name>
        <age> 20 </age>
        <place> Chennai </place>
</employee>

file.php

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

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

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