XML parsing in PHP not capturing one variable - php

Question

I am doing user Basic Auth in PHP and getting the results of the authentication via an XML file which is then parsed into PHP variables.
Here is the PHP code:
<?php
$username = filter_var($_POST['username'], FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING);
$password = filter_var($_POST['password'], FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING);
$str = $username . ":" . $password;
$client_id = md5($str);
$auth_str = base64_encode($str);
$client_id_str = "client-identifier: " . $client_id;
$plex_auth = "authorization: Basic " . $auth_str;
$curl = curl_init();
curl_setopt_array($curl, array(
CURLOPT_URL => "https://someurl/sign_in.xml",
CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,
CURLOPT_ENCODING => "",
CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS => 10,
CURLOPT_TIMEOUT => 30,
CURLOPT_HTTP_VERSION => CURL_HTTP_VERSION_1_1,
CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST => "POST",
CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER => array(
$plex_auth,
$client_id_str,
"header3",
"header4"
),
));
$response = curl_exec($curl);
$xml = simplexml_load_string($response);
$err = curl_error($curl);
curl_close($curl);
if ($err) {
echo "cURL Error #:" . $err;
} else {
echo $response;
}
$user_token = $xml->authenticationtoken;
$user_email = $xml->email;
echo $user_email;
echo $user_token;
?>
This is the response in XML:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<user email="xyz#gmail.com" id="2567053"
thumb="https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/somenumber"
username="Admin" title="Admin" cloudSyncDevice=""
authenticationToken="SomeToken" scrobbleTypes="">
<subscription active="1" status="Active" plan="lifetime">
<feature id="pass"/>
<feature id="sync"/>
<feature id="cloudsync"/>
<feature id="home"/>
</subscription>
<profile_settings auto_select_audio="1" auto_select_subtitle="0"
default_audio_language="en" default_subtitle_language="en"/>
<username>Admin</username>
<email>xyx#gmail.com</email>
<joined-at type="datetime">2014-05-08 17:59:24 UTC</joined-at>
<authentication-token>SomeToken</authentication-token>
</user>
Now for some reason while I can extract every other variable from the XML, the authenticationToken refuses to get parsed. when I echo user_token, it's completely empty!

Answer 1

According to the PHP docs examples on SimpleXML:
Accessing elements within an XML document that contain characters not permitted under PHP's naming convention (e.g. the hyphen) can be accomplished by encapsulating the element name within braces and the apostrophe.
So you can access it like this:
$user_token = $xml->{'authentication-token'};

Answer 2

The response in XML you provided does not appear to be a valid xml string.
I was unable to parse it until i added a '>' to the end of the 'user' tag.
Also, as mentioned in the answer before mine, you will need to access object properties that contain special characters with bracers and single qoutes:
$user_token = $xml->{'authentication-token'};
or like this:
$auth_token = 'authentication-token';
$user_token = $xml->$auth_token;