Why is new SimpleXMLElement causing a 500 error? - php

Question

I have a simple script that until yesterday had worked fine for 2 years. Im just taking a XML feed from a WP site and formatting it to be displayed on a different website. Here is the code:
<?php
function download_page($path){
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$path);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FAILONERROR,1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION,1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 15);
$retValue = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
return $retValue;
}
$sXML = download_page('https://example.com/tradeblog/feed/atom/');
$oXML = new SimpleXMLElement($sXML);
$items = $oXML->entry;
$i = 0;
foreach($items as $item) {
$title = $item->title;
$link = $item->link;
echo '<li>';
foreach($link as $links) {
$loc = $links['href'];
$href = str_replace("/feed/atom/", "", $loc);
echo "<a href=\"$href\" target=\"_blank\">";
}
echo $title;
echo "</a>";;
echo "</li>";
if(++$i == 3) break;
}
?>
I can echo out $sXML and it will display the entire XML contents as expected. When I try and echo $oXML I get the 500 error. Any use of $oXML causes the 500. What changed? Is there a different / better way to do this using PHP?

Answer 1

It seems your xml source is not exactly a xml. I tried to validate it using w3 scholl validator and it throws an error. Tried here too, and got the same error.

Answer 2

Not sure why, but this worked
<?php
$rss = new DOMDocument();
$rss->load('https://example.com/tradeblog/feed/rss2/');
$feed = array();
foreach ($rss->getElementsByTagName('item') as $node) {
$item = array (
'title' => $node->getElementsByTagName('title')->item(0)->nodeValue,
'link' => $node->getElementsByTagName('link')->item(0)->nodeValue,
);
array_push($feed, $item);
}
$limit = 3;
for($x=0;$x<$limit;$x++) {
$title = str_replace(' & ', ' & ', $feed[$x]['title']);
$link = $feed[$x]['link'];
echo '<li>'.$title.'</li>';
}
?>