Sorry to be asking this, but it's driving me crazy.
I've been using the php SimpleXMLElement as my XML go to parser, and I've looked at many examples, and have given up on this many times. But, now, I just need to have this working. There are many examples on how to get simple fields, but not so many with values in the fields...
I'm trying to get the "track_artist_name" value from this XML as a named variable in php.
<nowplaying-info-list>
<nowplaying-info >
<property name="track_title"><![CDATA[Song Title]]></property>
<property name="track_album_name"><![CDATA[Song Album]]></property>
<property name="track_artist_name"><![CDATA[Song Artist]]></property>
</nowplaying-info>
</nowplaying-info-list>
I've tried using xpath with:
$sxml->xpath("/nowplaying-info-list[0]/nowplaying-info/property[#name='track_artist_name']"));
But, I know it's all mucked up and not working.
I originally tried something like this too, thinking it made sense - but no:
attrs = $sxml->nowplaying_info[0]->property['#name']['track_artist_name'];
echo $attrs . "\n\n";
I know I can get the values with something such as this:
$sxml->nowplaying_info[0]->property[2];
Sometimes there are more lines in the XML results than other times, and so because of this, it is breaks the calculations with the wrong data.
Can someone shed some light on my problem? I'm just trying to the name of the artist to a variable. Many thanks.
*** WORKING UPDATE: **
I was unaware there were different XML interpreter methods, and was using the following XML interpreter version:
// read feed into SimpleXML object
$sxml = new SimpleXMLElement($json);
That didn't work, but have now updated to the following (for that section of code) thanks to the help here.
$sxml_new = simplexml_load_string($json_raw);
if ( $sxml_new->xpath("/nowplaying-info-list/nowplaying-info/property[#name='track_artist_name']") != null )
{
$results = $sxml_new->xpath("/nowplaying-info-list/nowplaying-info/property[#name='track_artist_name']");
//print_r($results);
$artist = (string) $results[0];
// var_dump($artist);
echo "Artist: " . $artist . "\n";
}
Your xpath expression is pretty much right, but you don't need to specify an index for the <nowplaying-info-list> element - it'll deal with that itself. If you were to supply an index, it would need to start at 1, not 0.
Try
$results = $sxml->xpath("/nowplaying-info-list/nowplaying-info/property[#name='track_artist_name']");
echo (string) $results[0];
Song Artist
See https://3v4l.org/eH4Dr
Your second approach:
$sxml->nowplaying_info[0]->property['#name']['track_artist_name'];
Would be trying to access the attribute named #name of the first property element, rather than treating it as an xpath-style # expression. To do this without using xpath, you'd need to loop over each of the <property> elements, and test their name attibrute.
Just in case if the node you are looking for is deeply residing some where, you could just add a double slash at the start.
$results = $sxml->xpath("//nowplaying-info-list/nowplaying-info/property[#name='track_artist_name']");
Also in case if you have multiple <nowplaying-info> elements. You could make of use of the index for that. (note the [1] index)
$results = $sxml->xpath("//nowplaying-info-list/nowplaying-info[1]/property[#name='track_artist_name']");
Related
I'm new to PHP, MySQL and XML... and have been trying to wrap my head around classes, objects, arrays and loops. I'm working on a parser that extracts data from an XML file, then stores it into a database. A fun and delightfully frustrating challenge to work on during the christmas holiday.
Before posting this question I've gone over the PHP5.x documentation, W3C and also searched quite a bit around stackoverflow.
Here's the code...
> XML:
<alliancedata>
<server>
<name>irrelevant</name>
</server>
<alliances>
<alliance>
<alliance id="101">Knock Out</alliance>
<roles>
<role>
<role id="1">irrelevant</role>
</role>
</roles>
<relationships>
<relationship>
<proposedbyalliance id="102" />
<acceptedbyalliance id="101" />
<relationshiptype id="4">NAP</relationshiptype>
<establishedsince>2014-12-27T18:01:34.130</establishedsince>
</relationship>
<relationship>
<proposedbyalliance id="101" />
<acceptedbyalliance id="103" />
<relationshiptype id="4">NAP</relationshiptype>
<establishedsince>2014-12-27T18:01:34.130</establishedsince>
</relationship>
<relationship>
<proposedbyalliance id="104" />
<acceptedbyalliance id="101" />
<relationshiptype id="4">NAP</relationshiptype>
<establishedsince>2014-12-27T18:01:34.130</establishedsince>
</relationship>
</relationships>
</alliance>
</alliancedata>
> PHP:
$xml = simplexml_load_file($alliances_xml); // $alliances_xml = path to file
// die(var_dump($xml));
// var_dump prints out the entire unparsed xml file.
foreach ($xml->alliances as $alliances) {
// Alliance info
$alliance_id = mysqli_real_escape_string($dbconnect, $alliances->alliance->alliance['id']);
$alliance_name = mysqli_real_escape_string($dbconnect,$alliances->alliance->alliance);
// Diplomacy info
$proposed_by_alliance_id = mysqli_real_escape_string($dbconnect,$alliances->alliance->relationships->relationship->proposedbyalliance['id']);
$accepted_by_alliance_id = mysqli_real_escape_string($dbconnect,$alliances->alliance->relationships->relationship->acceptedbyalliance['id']);
$relationship_type_id = mysqli_real_escape_string($dbconnect,$alliances->alliance->relationships->relationship->relationshiptype['id']);
$established_date = mysqli_real_escape_string($dbconnect,$alliances->alliance->relationships->relationship->establishedsince);
// this is my attempt to echo every result
echo "Alliance ID: <b>$alliance_id</b> <br/>";
echo "Alliance NAME: <b>$alliance_name</b> <br/>";
echo "Diplomacy Proposed: <b>$proposed_by_alliance_id</b> <br/>";
echo "Diplomacy Accepted: <b>$accepted_by_alliance_id</b> <br/>";
echo "Diplomacy Type: <b>$relationship_type_id</b> <br/>";
echo "Date Accepted: <b>$established_date</b> <br/>";
echo "<hr/>";
}
> intrepter output:
Alliance ID: 1
Alliance NAME: Knock Out
Diplomacy Proposed: 102
Diplomacy Accepted: 101
Diplomacy Type: 4
Date Accepted: 2011-10-24T05:08:35.830
I don't understand why the loop simply stops after parsing the first row of data. My best guess, is that my code is not telling PHP what to do after the first values are parsed.
Honestly I have no idea how to explain this in words, so here's a visual representation.
First row is interpreted as
--->$alliance_id
--->$alliance_name
--->$proposed_by_alliance_id
--->$accepted_by_alliance_id
--->$relationship_type_id
--->$established_date
then for the next <relationship> subnodes the following happens...
---> ?? _(no data)_
---> ?? _(no data)_
--->$proposed_by_alliance_id
--->$accepted_by_alliance_id
--->$relationship_type_id
--->$established_date
Since I'm not telling PHP to add $alliance_id and $alliance_name to every iteration of the <relationship> subnode, the interpreter simply decides to abort the foreach operation.
As I mentioned above, I'm new to both PHP and Stackoverflow and I really appreciate any help or wisdom you can share. Thank you in advance.
You write that you've got problems to debug your issues traversing an XML document with SimpleXML.
The first puzzle you come over is that your foreach does only iterate once:
foreach ($xml->alliances as $alliances) {
You can't accept the fact. However, if we take the XML you've got in your question and actually take a look how many <alliances> elements the XML document has, we can see that SimpleXML is doing the right thing here:
there is exactly one (1) <alliances> element inside the document element.
$xml->alliances has one (1) iteration.
$xml->alliances->count() gives int(1)
The accordance with the XML can be easily verified as well. Commented dead code in your questions example suggests that you were using var_dump to see whether or not the XML loads. You don't have to, if simplexml_load_file does not return false, the document was loaded (if you opt for falsy: the document was either not loaded or empty).
So if you want to ensure the document has loaded, just check the return value and throw an exception in case there was a problem.
To check which XML a SimpleXMLElement contains, you shouldn't use var_dump as well. Instead output the XML. As the XML can be quite large at this point, take only the first 256 bytes for example, that normally shows a good picture:
echo substr($xml->alliances->asXML(), 0, 256), "\n";
<alliances>
<alliance>
<alliance id="1">Harmless?</alliance>
<foundedbyplayerid id="10"/><alliancecapitaltownid id="14646"/>
<allianceticker>H?</allianceticker>
<foundeddatetime>2010-02-25T14:18:07.867</foundeddatetime>
<alliancecapitallastmoved>2012-01-19T17:42
^^^^^^^^^
This directly shows that you're iterating over the element(s) named alliances which exist only once in the document. This is totally aligned with the observation you've made that there is only one foreach.
With this really basic debugging you can do the following conclusion:
It is observed that Foreach does only iterate once (1).
Foreach has been commanded to iterates over elements named alliances.
As there is only one (1) iteration, there has to be only one (1) alliances element.
Counting the alliances elements, the result is one.
Therefore it is confirmed that there is only one (1) alliances element.
So obviously you're iterating over the wrong element(s).
As this outline of the error finding is rather extensive (just to give you the picture at which many points you could have already improved both your code but also the error checking and especially to show you places where you can start with trouble-shooting), the question remains, why you weren't able to spot this already. As until now, an answer here already pointed to the fact, that you were iterating over the wrong element(s). However it was not written out, but just a bit cryptic in code:
[...] change your for loop from foreach ($xml->alliances->alliance as $alliance) { to foreach ($xml->alliance as $alliance) {
and that's all
Source
Sure it's weak, as this only gives code but doesn't answer any of your (programming) question(s).
After finding the cause, let's cure this step by step
So after finding out that it's the wrong element, it's easy to fix that: iterate over the right elements.
This can be done by applying incremental changes to your code.
First of all the correct element needs to be chosen:
foreach ($xml->alliances->alliance as $alliances) {
This will immediately make your code spit out a lot of errors, many for each iteration. And there are many iterations. So you can already say with this little change, something was effectively changed into the right direction: Instead of one iteration, there are now many more.
But before fixing the mess with the newly introduced errors and warnings, first take care about the code just changed. The next thing is to rename the variable $alliances to $alliance (your editor should support your with that by either using search and replace (often CTRL+R) or by offering a refactoring command named "rename variable" (e.g. SHIFT+F6 in Phpstorm)). Afterwards that line (and the following lines are also changed but I don't show them) looks like:
foreach ($xml->alliances->alliance as $alliance) {
And it's yet still not ready. As $xml->alliances->alliance is a bit bulky, let's move it out and take a more speaking variable for that: $alliances:
$alliances = $xml->alliances->alliance;
foreach ($alliances as $alliance) {
The next step that needs to be done is just to correct an error you made. For some obscure reason totally not clear to me is that pass all data through mysqli_real_escape_string(). Even though if you would have intended to pass the data later on to a database, this is yet at the wrong place to call that function. First of all extract the data, that function is called later on in preparation of the database insert operation which is a different part of your application.
I just replaced all occurences of "mysqli_real_escape_string($dbconnect," with "trim(" so that finally - after proper indentation - the code has changed to this:
$alliances = $xml->alliances->alliance;
foreach ($alliances as $alliance) {
// Alliance info
$alliance_id = trim($alliance->alliance->alliance['id']);
$alliance_name = trim($alliance->alliance->alliance);
// Diplomacy info
$proposed_by_alliance_id = trim($alliance->alliance->relationships->relationship->proposedbyalliance['id']);
$accepted_by_alliance_id = trim($alliance->alliance->relationships->relationship->acceptedbyalliance['id']);
$relationship_type_id = trim($alliance->alliance->relationships->relationship->relationshiptype['id']);
$established_date = trim($alliance->alliance->relationships->relationship->establishedsince);
Thanks to the better named variables it now is pretty visible where the many
Notice: Trying to get property of non-object
warnings come from: The many calls to $alliance->alliance-> are just redundant. If we remember that originally you did iterate over the wrong elements, this is the counter-part: Because you used the wrong elements, you had to make the error more than once, otherwise you could not have extracted any data at all. Just think a second about this. It also means, that the earlier you could have verified that what your intention to do is actually done by the code, the less little problems were introduced.
Good thing here again is that this is easy to fix by replacing all "$alliance->alliance->" with "$alliance->":
$alliances = $xml->alliances->alliance;
foreach ($alliances as $alliance) {
// Alliance info
$alliance_id = trim($alliance->alliance['id']);
$alliance_name = trim($alliance->alliance);
// Diplomacy info
$proposed_by_alliance_id = trim($alliance->relationships->relationship->proposedbyalliance['id']);
$accepted_by_alliance_id = trim($alliance->relationships->relationship->acceptedbyalliance['id']);
$relationship_type_id = trim($alliance->relationships->relationship->relationshiptype['id']);
$established_date = trim($alliance->relationships->relationship->establishedsince);
Running the code again now shows that the iteration works and the information to obtain from each alliance element works perfectly fine as well. Still there are errors given because as you already say in your question, you not only wonder about the iteration but also about further traversing the relationships:
Alliance ID ......: 1
Alliance NAME ....: Harmless?
Diplomacy Proposed: 454
Diplomacy Accepted: 1
Diplomacy Type ...: 4
Date Accepted ...: 2011-10-24T05:08:35.830
-------------------------------------------------
[4x Notice: Trying to get property of non-object]
Alliance ID ......: 2
Alliance NAME ....: Danger
Diplomacy Proposed:
Diplomacy Accepted:
Diplomacy Type ...:
Date Accepted ...:
-------------------------------------------------
...
The error messages correspond to the following four lines:
$proposed_by_alliance_id = trim($alliance->relationships->relationship->proposedbyalliance['id']);
$accepted_by_alliance_id = trim($alliance->relationships->relationship->acceptedbyalliance['id']);
$relationship_type_id = trim($alliance->relationships->relationship->relationshiptype['id']);
$established_date = trim($alliance->relationships->relationship->establishedsince);
Which means, that again, you need to apply trouble-shooting steps as outlined at the very beginning of my answer to this section now of your code.
Here is the code example so far:
$xml = simplexml_load_file($alliances_xml); // $alliances_xml = path to file
if (!$xml) {
throw new UnexpectedValueException(
sprintf("Unable to load XML or it was empty. Filename given was %s", var_export($alliances_xml, true))
);
}
$alliances = $xml->alliances->alliance;
// limit to two iterations for debugging
$alliances = new LimitIterator(new IteratorIterator($alliances), 0, 2);
foreach ($alliances as $alliance) {
// Alliance info
$alliance_id = trim($alliance->alliance['id']);
$alliance_name = trim($alliance->alliance);
// Diplomacy info
$proposed_by_alliance_id = trim($alliance->relationships->relationship->proposedbyalliance['id']);
$accepted_by_alliance_id = trim($alliance->relationships->relationship->acceptedbyalliance['id']);
$relationship_type_id = trim($alliance->relationships->relationship->relationshiptype['id']);
$established_date = trim($alliance->relationships->relationship->establishedsince);
// this is my attempt to echo every result
echo "Alliance ID ......: $alliance_id\n";
echo "Alliance NAME ....: $alliance_name\n";
echo "Diplomacy Proposed: $proposed_by_alliance_id\n";
echo "Diplomacy Accepted: $accepted_by_alliance_id\n";
echo "Diplomacy Type ...: $relationship_type_id\n";
echo "Date Accepted ...: $established_date\n";
echo "-------------------------------------------------\n";
}
Please note that I'm using the command-line to execute the PHP code as it's much faster then via the browser over a webserver. I also do not need to write HTML to just have nicely formatted output.
I made phpfiddle of your code, tested, working.
http://phpfiddle.org/main/code/7agg-si3f
You need to remove
<server>
<name>Epic1</name>
</server>
and add </alliances> to the end, since it's reporting invalid xml
after that change your for loop from foreach ($xml->alliances->alliance as $alliance) {
to foreach ($xml->alliance as $alliance) {
and that's all
I'm working on some system for a few hours now and this little thing is too much for me to think logically about at the moment.
Normally I would wait a few hours but this is a last minute job and I need to finish this.
Here's my problem:
I have an XML file that gets posted to my PHP file, the PHP file inserts certain data into a DB, but some XML nodes have the same name:
<accessoires>
<accessoire>value1</accessoire>
<accessoire>value2</accessoire>
<accessoire>value3</accessoire>
</accessoires>
Now I want to get a var $acclist which contains all values seperated by a comma:
value1,value2,value3,
I bet the solution to this is very easy but I'm at the known point where even the easiest piece of code becomes a hassle. And googling only comes up with nodes that in some way have their own identifiers.
Could someone help me out please?
You can try simplexml_load_string to parse the html then call implode on the node after casting to an array.
NOTE This code was tested in php 5.4.6 and behaves as expected.
<?php
$xml = '<accessoires>
<accessoire>value1</accessoire>
<accessoire>value2</accessoire>
<accessoire>value3</accessoire>
</accessoires>';
$dat = simplexml_load_string($xml);
echo implode(",",(array)$dat->accessoire);
For 5.3.x I had to change to
$xml = '<accessoires>
<accessoire>value1</accessoire>
<accessoire>value2</accessoire>
<accessoire>value3</accessoire>
</accessoires>';
$dat = simplexml_load_string($xml);
$dat = (array)$dat;
echo implode(",",$dat["accessoire"]);
You do this by taking a library that is able to parse and process XML, for example with SimpleXML:
implode(',', iterator_to_array($accessoires->accessoire, FALSE));
The key part here is to use iterator_to_array() as SimpleXML offers the same-named child-elements here as an iterator. Otherwise $accessoires->accessoire gives you auto-magically only the first element (if any).
I'd like to parse google geocode api respond, but the structure of the result is not always the same. I need to know the postal code for example, but it is sometimes in the Locality/DependentLocality/PostalCode/PostalCodeNumber node and sometimes in the Locality/PostalCode/PostalCodeNumber node. I don't really know the logic behind this, just want to get the value of the PostalCodeNumber node, no matter where is it exactly. Can I do it with XPath? If so, how?
UPDATE
Tried with //PostalCodeNumber but it returns an empty array. The code snippet is the following:
$xml = new \SimpleXMLElement($response);
var_dump($xml->xpath('//PostalCodeNumber'));
The $response is the content of http://maps.google.com/maps/geo?q=1055+Budapest&output=xml
(copy paste the url instead of clicking on it because of some character problems...)
Try to use this XPath:
Locality//PostalCodeNumber
It will find all descendants PostalCodeNumber of Locality element.
//PostalCode/PostalCodeNumber
Should do the trick. A quick google search yields the following schema snippet, indicating that there may be multiple DependentLocality elements, nested, so you'll want to check for multiple results, and have some idea of whether you want the most specific (most deeply nested) or least specific.
Update:
To guard against namespace issues, explicitly add the namespace to the query:
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($response);
$xpath->registerXPathNamespace('ns', 'urn:oasis:names:tc:ciq:xsdschema:xAL:2.0');
var_dump($xml->xpath('//ns:PostalCodeNumber'));
Update 2: fixed a couple of typos
Update 3:
<?php
$result = file_get_contents('http://maps.google.com/maps/geo?q=1055+Budapest&output=xml');
$sxe = new SimpleXMLElement($result);
$sxe->registerXPathNamespace('c', 'urn:oasis:names:tc:ciq:xsdschema:xAL:2.0');
$search = $sxe->xpath('//c:PostalCodeNumber');
foreach($search as $code) {
echo $code;
}
?>
i have a problem with getting content from a XML into a mysql database.
This is the code:
$objDOM = new DOMDocument('1.0', 'UTF-8');
$objDOM->load("something.xml"); $IAutnr = $objDOM->getElementsByTagName("Data");
Now, in a for loop:
for($i=$t;$i<=$max;$i++) {
$some= $objDOM->getElementsByTagName("some");
$something = $some->item($i)->nodeValue;
$some2 = $objDOM->getElementsByTagName("some2");
$something2 = $some2->item($i)->nodeValue;
Now put $something and $something2 into the database
}
Now, what happens is, that everything works perfectly fine until one of the Elements (some,some2...) does not exist within the tag "Data". So what he does, is taking the element from the next "Data"-tag and this mixes all my data, so I have data in my database, that actually doesnt belong there. And so I have an all mixed up database.
I allready tried for several hours to change the XML manually by putting the missing tags inside, but with thousands of data records, it is not possible.
So I need to add something into my code, that will have the effect, that if the tag doesnt exist, just leave it and dont take the tag from the next "Data"-Tag.
I actually dont even understand why he is doing that, why is he just jumping into the next "Data"-tag?
Thank you very much for your help!
I'm only guessing here about the content of your XML structure, but I imagine it looks something like
...
<Data>
<some>a</some>
<some2>b</some2>
</Data>
<Data>
<some>c</some>
<some2>d</some2>
</Data>
...
If this is the case, you should be looping over the collection of Data elements in $IAutnr, eg
for($i = 0, $limit = min($IAutnr->length, $max); $i < $limit; $i++) {
$data = $IAutnr->item($i);
$some = $data->getElementsByTagName('some');
$something = $some->item(0)->nodeValue;
$some2 = $data->getElementsByTagName('some2');
$something2 = $some2->item(0)->nodeValue;
// insert
}
Unless you need some of the more advanced features of the DOM library, I'd recommend using SimpleXML.
It does that because you're asking it to extract elements with tag name "some" and "some2" from the entire XML structure, so that's what it does -- it doesn't only look into the branch you intend it to, because you never tell it to do that. One way to fix it is to look at $some->items($i)->parentNode (and maybe to that node's parent, and so on) in order to properly identify the parent $something and $something2 belong to. Of course, there's no guarantee that $something and $something2 belong to the same parent, unless your XML is somehow guaranteed to present either none or both within the same branch. I know the explanation's a bit hairy, but that's the best way I could put it into words.
I'm trying to parse this feed: http://musicbrainz.org/ws/1/artist/c0b2500e-0cef-4130-869d-732b23ed9df5?type=xml&inc=url-rels
I want to grab the URLs inside the 'relation-list' tag.
I've tried fetching the URL with PHP using simplexml_load_file(), but I can't access it using $feed->artist->relation-list as PHP interprets "list" as the list() function.
I have a feeling I'm going about this wrong (not much XML experience), and even if I was able to get hold of the elements I want, I don't know how to extract their attributes (I just want the type and target fields).
Can anyone gently nudge me in the right direction?
Thanks.
Matt
Have a look at the examples on the php.net page, they actually tell you how to solve this:
// $feed->artist->relation-list
$feed->artist->{'relation-list'}
To get an attribute of a node, just use the attribute name as array index on the node:
foreach( $feed->artist->{'relation-list'}->relation as $relation ) {
$target = (string)$relation['target'];
$type = (string)$relation['type'];
// Do something with it
}
(Untested)