parse and process HTML/XML/plain text page [duplicate] - php

Question

This question already has answers here:
How do you parse and process HTML/XML in PHP?
(31 answers)
Closed 3 years ago.
I am creating a small php app that pulls data from a remote website its working great but i would like to make it more user friendly now.
I need to get a few specific items from the page and as far as I can tell the page looks like an xml file wen you look at sorce code but it has no style to it and appears as plain text so I don't really know what to do.
The page I am trying to get looks like this
<channel>
<name>data</name>
<id>data</id>
<img>data</img>
<auther>data</auther>
<mp3>data</mp3>
<bio>data</bio>
</channel>
<channel>
<name>data</name>
<id>data</id>
<img>data</img>
<auther>data</auther>
<mp3>data</mp3>
<bio>data</bio>
</channel>
<channel>
<name>data</name>
<id>data</id>
<img>data</img>
<auther>data</auther>
<mp3>data</mp3>
<bio>data</bio>
</channel>
<channel>
<name>data</name>
<id>data</id>
<img>data</img>
<auther>data</auther>
<mp3>data</mp3>
<bio>data</bio>
</channel>
I need to get all the data from each tag under the channel tag and keep it in the same order to echo it back out onto my own page in the same way.
How could i do this ? i tried using regex with the following patter
$pattern = '<channel>
<name>(.*)</name>
<id>(.*)</id>
<img>(.*)</img>
<auther>(.*)</auther>
<mp3>(.*)</mp3>
<bio>(.*)</bio>
</channel>';
but that doesn't work I really need the best and simplest way to do this.

Answer 1

$SimpleXMLElement = new SimpleXMLElement($str);
foreach ($SimpleXMLElement->children() as $Channel) {
foreach ($Channel->children() as $Child) {
echo $Child->getName() . ' = ' . (string) $Child;
}
}
this way you can use SimpleXMLElement, it's very easy

Answer 2

I would "sanitize" the incoming data and make an xml document out of it. This can be done by simply wrapping it into a surrounding tag. (I name it channels). Having this, you can parse the data using DOM:
// Sanitize input data. Make an xml out of it
$xml = '<channels>';
$xml .= file_get_contents($url);
$xml .= '</channels>';
// Create a document
$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->loadXML($xml);
// Iterate through channel elements
foreach($doc->getElementsByTagName('channel') as $channel) {
echo $channel->getElementsByTagName('name')->item(0)->nodeValue . PHP_EOL;
echo $channel->getElementsByTagName('id')->item(0)->nodeValue . PHP_EOL;
// And so on ...
}