SimpleXMLElement Error - php

Question

When attempting to create a new instance of SimpleXMLElement from a URL, I get the error Uncaught exception 'Exception' with message 'String could not be parsed as XML'.
Details:
$feed_url = 'https://www.ua.edu/news/feed/';
$the_feed = new SimpleXMLElement( $feed_url, LIBXML_NOCDATA, true );
When executing the code above, the error appears on both the Stage and Prod environments but not in Dev. I have compared the xml related settings between the Stage and Dev environments and only slight version differences exist (Dev is a SLIGHTLY older version of PHP than Stage/Prod).
$feed_url = 'http://hiphopdx.com/rss/news.xml';
$the_feed = new SimpleXMLElement( $feed_url, LIBXML_NOCDATA, true );
In Stage (Can't test this part in Prod), I changed the $feed_url variable to another feed's URL. Everything works as expected. A SimpleXMLElement object is created and can be dumped to the screen.
I have no clue how to proceed to correct this. Any help is much appreciated.

Answer 1

I checked all of the server settings that were referenced in similar questions and they were all properly set. I never did figure out why it wasn't pulling the XML from the file. The solution that I ended up using was to use curl to get the XML from the URL and SimpleXMLELEMENT to handle the raw XML.
function produce_XML_object_tree($raw_XML) {
libxml_use_internal_errors(true);
try {
$xmlTree = new SimpleXMLElement($raw_XML);
} catch (Exception $e) {
// Something went wrong.
$error_message = 'SimpleXMLElement threw an exception.';
foreach(libxml_get_errors() as $error_line) {
$error_message .= "\t" . $error_line->message;
}
trigger_error($error_message);
return false;
}
return $xmlTree;
}
$feed_url = 'http://feed.url';
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $feed_url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$xml = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
$the_feed = produce_XML_object_tree($xml)