Accessing XML Data From PHP cURL while it's running - php

Question

I have the following code
$URL = 'https://hostedconnect.m5net.com/bobl/bobl';
$xml = '<Command xmlns:m5="http://www.m5net.com/org/m5/data/v2/cti" xmlns:csta="http://www.ecma-international.org/standards/ecma-323/csta/ed5">
<ApplicationContext>BoblConsole</ApplicationContext>
<Arguments xsi:type="org.m5.data.v2.cti.HostedConnectObject" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
<csta:MonitorStart>
<csta:monitorObject>
<csta:deviceObject>DEVICE</csta:deviceObject>
</csta:monitorObject>
</csta:MonitorStart>
</Arguments>
<FormattedXml>true</FormattedXml>
<Id>9</Id>
<Name>org.m5.apps.v2.cti.HostedConnect.request</Name>
<Password>PASSWORD</Password>
<User>USER</User>
</Command>';
$ch = curl_init($URL);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 30);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array (
'Transfer-Encoding: chunked',
'Content-Encoding: chunked',
'Connection: keep-alive',
'Content-Type: text/xml'
));
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, "$xml");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$result = curl_exec($ch);
$test = stream_get_contents($fp_tmp);
The API is supposed to return XML data, but I'm not sure how to access that data while the cURL is running. I've tried using streams, and writing the data to a file, but none of them seem to work. The cURL request is working properly. When just running it returns 550 bytes, when an event happens that is supposed to return data it returns 9100 bytes. This leads me to believe that the correct thing is happening, but I don't know how to access the data from the curl.
I need to the curl to run continuously, this is for monitoring our phone system via the api provided by our hosting provider.

Answer 1

Try a CURLOPT_WRITEFUNCTION as described under http://docs.php.net/manual/en/function.curl-setopt.php
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_WRITEFUNCTION, function($ch, $data) {
static $buffer = '';
$buffer .= $data;
// <-- parse xml data here -->
// <-- remove the consumed part from $buffer -->
return strlen($data);
});
//curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
The tricky party will be parsing the xml data since it's not guaranteed that each single chunk (i.e. $data) is one xml packet - probably not even that each chunk belongs to exactly one xml element/document.
Try to find an xml sax/pull parser that takes chunks of data and parses them as far as possible (...and tells you how much data it did consume, so you can store the remaining data between calls and/or start over with the next element/document).
In this particular case maybe ...just maybe, I would revert to a regular expression to find the start and end tag of the event and then put that (sub-)string into an xml parser.