Laravel: Parsing XML with SimpleXML namespace issue [duplicate] - php

Question

This question has two parts.
Part 1. Yesterday I had some code which would echo the entire content of the XML from an RSS feed. Then I deleted it from my php document, saved over it, and I am totally kicking myself.
I believe the syntax went something like this:
$xml = simplexml_load_file($url);
echo $xml;
I tried that again and it is not working, so apparently I forgot the correct syntax and could use your help, dear stackoverflow question answerers.
I keep trying to figure out what I was doing and I am unable to find an example on Google or the PHP site. I tried the print_r($url); command, and it gives me what appears to be an atomized version of the feed. I want the whole string, warts and all. I realize that I could just type the RSS link into the window and see it, but it was helpful to have it on my PHP page as I am coding and noding.
Part 2 The main reason I wanted to reconstruct this is because I am trying to parse nodes off a blog RSS in order to display it on a webpage hosted on a private domain. I posted a dummy blog and discovered an awkward formatting glitch when I failed to add a title to one of the dummy posts.
So what does one do in this situation? I tried a little:
if(entry->title == "")
{$entryTitle = "untitled";}
That did not work at all.
Here's my entire php script for the handling of the blog:
<?php
/*create variables*/
$subtitle ="";
$entryTitle="";
$html = "";
$pubDate ="";
/*Store RSS feed address in new variable*/
$url = "http://www.blogger.com/feeds/6552111825067891333/posts/default";
/*Retrieve BLOG XML and store it in PHP object*/
$xml = simplexml_load_file($url);
print_r($xml);
/*Parse blog subtitle into HTML and echo it on the page*/
$subtitle .= "<h2 class='blog'>" . $xml->subtitle . "</h2><br />";
echo $subtitle;
/*Go through all the entries and parse them into HTML*/
foreach($xml->entry as $entry){
/*retrieve publication date*/
$xmlDate = $entry->published;
/*Convert XML timestamp into PHP timestamp*/
$phpDate = new DateTime(substr($xmlDate,0,19));
/*Format PHP timestamp to something humans understand*/
$pubDate .= $phpDate->format('l\, F j\, Y h:i A');
if ($entry->title == "")
{
$entryTitle .= "Untitled";
}
echo $entry->title;
/*Pick through each entry and parse each XML tree node into an HTML ready blog post*/
$html .= "<h3 class='blog'>".$entry->title . "<span class='pubDate'> | " .$pubDate . "</span></h3><p class='blog'>" . $entry->content . "</p>";
/*Print the HTML to the web page*/
echo $html;
/*Set the variables back to empty strings so they do not repeat data upon reiteration*/
$html = "";
$pubDate = "";
}
?>

Answer 1

According to the php manual:
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($string);
.
.
.
then if you want to echo the result:
echo $xml->asXML();
or save the xml to a file:
$xml->asXML('blog.xml');
References
http://php.net/manual/fr/simplexmlelement.asxml.php
http://spotlesswebdesign.com/blog.php?id=14

Answer 2

Part 1
This is still not exactly what I wanted, but rather a very tidy and organized way of echoing the xml data:
$url = "http://www.blogger.com/feeds/6552111825067891333/posts/default";
$xml = simplexml_load_file($url);
echo '<pre>';
print_r($xml);
Part 2
I had to get firephp running so I could see exactly what elements php was encountering when it reached an entry without a blog title. Ultimately it is an empty array. Therefore, the simple:
if(empty($entry->title))
works perfectly. For string comparison, I found that you can simply cast it as a string. For my purposes, that was unnecessary.

Answer 3

The simplexml_load_file returns an SimpleXMLElement, so:
print_r($xml);
will show its minor objects and arrays.
After your tweaks you can call $xml->asXML("filename.xml"); as #Tim Withers pointed out.

Answer 4

Part 1: echo $xml->asXML(); - http://www.php.net/manual/en/simplexmlelement.asxml.php
Part 2: php SimpleXML check if a child exists
$html .= "<h3 class='blog'>".($entry->title!=null?$entry->title:'No Title')
. "<span class='pubDate'> | " .$pubDate . "</span></h3><p class='blog'>"
. $entry->content . "</p>";
Note I would probably load the url like this:
$feedUrl = 'http://www.blogger.com/feeds/6552111825067891333/posts/default';
$rawFeed = file_get_contents($feedUrl);
$xml = new SimpleXmlElement($rawFeed);
Based on your comment in regards to part 1, I am not sure if the XML is being loaded completely. If you try loading it this way, it should display all the XML data.