cannot get xml from url in PHP - php

Question

I am very new to both php and xml. What I am trying to do in
php is read in xml from a call to a url, and then parse the xml.
(I can get this to work in the example below when $urlip = 'localfile.xml'
but not when I put in a url. Ive checked the url by going to it with my browser,
and I can see the xml. I also did a show source, copied it and then pasted the
xml into the localfile and that works fine.
What am I doing wrong in trying to get the xml from the url?
Thank you
The error being returned is:
Error loading XML Start tag expected, ‘<' not found
Here is my code snip it:
$urlip="test.xml";# for debugging since I cannot read from the url yet! not sure why....
if (($xml = file_get_contents($urlip))===false) {
echo "error fetching XML\n";
} else {
libxml_use_internal_errors(true);
$data = simplexml_load_string($xml,null,LIBXML_NOCDATA);
if (!$data) {
echo "Error loading XML\n";
foreach(libxml_get_errors() as $error) {
echo "\t", $error->message;
}
} else {
foreach ($data as $item) {
$type = $item->TAB_TYPE;
$number=$item->ALT_ID;
$title = $item->SHORT_DESCR;
$searchlink = $item->ID;
$rsite=$item->CATEGORY;
echo "type $type, number $number, title $title, search link $searchlink, site $rsite\n";
}
}
}

Answer 1

Most likely situation from what it looks like:
Your function queries the remote URL and returns you an empty string, which passes the condition of your 'if' statement.
After that - you try to pass the empty string into XML, but it cannot, so it gives you an error.
Your steps to solve it:
configure php to open remote urls as comments to your question state - url_fopen
use another way to get content from the URL - cURL library works well