Attempting to parse XML/JSON from an API output - php

Question

OK... I am using PHP 5 (be gentle, still learning PHP). CURL is enabled. Attempting to load XML or JSON output from an API to an object and nothing happens. When I manually execute the URL in question, I get what I am expecting.
Here is my code:
class XmlToJson {
public function Parse ($url) {
$fileContents = file_get_contents($url);
$fileContents = str_replace(array("\n", "\r", "\t"), '', $fileContents);
$fileContents = trim(str_replace('"', "'", $fileContents));
$simpleXml = simplexml_load_string($fileContents);
$json = json_encode($simpleXml);
return $json;
}
}
$_MySQLServer = "localhost";
$_MySQLServerUserName = "";
$_MySQLServerPassword = "";
$_MySQLDatabaseName = "";
$_SSActiveWear_UserID = "*****";
$_SSActiveWear_APIKey = "*****";
$_SSActiveWear_APIBaseURL = "https://*****/v2";
$_CategoryURL = "/categories/";
$_StylesURL = "/styles/";
$_ProductsURL = "/products/";
$_SpecsURL = "/specs/";
$_SSActiveWear_MediaType = "xml";
//$_conn = mysqli_connect($_MySQLServer, $_MySQLServerUserName, $_MySQLServerPassword, $_MySQLDatabaseName);
//Insert or Update Categories
$_URL = $_SSActiveWear_APIBaseURL . $_CategoryURL;
$_URL = $_URL . "?mediatype=$_SSActiveWear_MediaType&UserName=$_SSActiveWear_UserID&Password=$_SSActiveWear_APIKey";
$OBJ = simplexml_load_string($_URL);
print_r($OBJ);
What am I doing wrong?
Edit 1
Added the following code:
$xml = simplexml_load_file($_URL) or die("Error: Cannot create object");
print_r($xml);
and it dies. Does that mean that there is something wrong with the code?

Answer 1

Try this :
$OBJ = simplexml_load_string(file_get_contents($_URL));
If you want to know why your code is not working, you are trying to load XML from URL but "simplexml_load_string" loads XML from string.

Answer 2

I FINALLY figured it out... More to the point I finally found a site on Google that helped. It is the first answer in fsockopen with http authentication problem.
So here is the code that works:
file_get_contents("https://$_SSActiveWear_UserID:$_SSActiveWear_APIKey#$_SSActiveWear_APIBaseURL$_CategoryURL/?mediatype=$_SSActiveWear_MediaType");
mediatype can be either json or xml