I got a problem I cant solve for 7 hours now.
this is my php script for creating user on openfire server:
$f = fopen("LINK","r");
$odpoved = fread($f, 1024);
in manual http://www.igniterealtime.org/projects/openfire/plugins/userservice/readme.html is written that my variable should contain either "OK" or "UserAlreadyExistsException". When i try to print $odpoved, it show good, when i view source of that page it contain tags as written in manual. My problem is, that i cant for gods sake find a way to use this variable in switch. This is how it looks now:
switch($odpoved){
case 'OK':
print("something");
break;
case 'UserAlreadyExistsException':
print("something2");
break;
default:
print("X");
}
fclose($f);
No matter what i do, it always print default. I dont understand what is wrong with it. I tried already to compare it to options with tags too, but it didnt help and it always end up in default.
Would you kindly help me please? Thanks for any help and if needed I will provide additional details.
The server will reply to all User Service requests with an XML result page. If the request was processed successfully the return will be a "result" element with a text body of "OK". If the request was unsuccessful, the return will be an "error" element with a text body of one of the following error strings.
The output is an XML file, so what you're looking at is using an XML parser to get the result element. simplexml will load it into an array (since this xml page is small you shouldn't have to worry about performance so more complicated xml parsers aren't worth the trouble)
$output = simplexml_load_string($odpoved)
switch($output->result) //check $odpoved to make sure the XML structure matches
Or, you can also pass the url using simplexml_load_file
the output will be the same.
for more information, see: http://www.sitepoint.com/parsing-xml-with-simplexml/
Your switch statement looks fine to me. I would question the content in your variable $odpoved. Use var_dump($odpoved) to see what it contains and be sure to check for leading and trailing spaces or hidden characters (newline chars are sometimes hard to spot).
For switch statement analysis check out http://www.php.net/manual/en/control-structures.switch.php
Related
OK, so I shave my head, but if I had hair I wouldn't need a razor because I'd have torn it all out tonight. It's gone 3am and what looked like a simple solution at 00:30 has become far from it.
Please see the code extract below..
$psusername = substr($list[$count],16);
if ($psusername == $psu_value){
$answer = "YES";
}
else {
$answer = "NO";
}
$psusername holds the value "normann" which is taken from a URL in a text based file (url.db)
$psu_value also holds the value "normann" which is retrieved from a cookie set on the user's computer (or a parameter in the browser address bar - URL).
However, and I'm sure you can guess my problem, the variable $answer contains "NO" from the test above.
All the PHP I know I've picked up from Google searches and you guys here, so I'm no expert, which is perhaps evident.
Maybe this is a schoolboy error, but I cannot figure out what I'm doing wrong. My assumption is that the data types differ. Ultimately, I want to compare the two variables and have a TRUE result when they contain the same information (i.e normann = normann).
So if you very clever fellows can point out why two variables echo what appears to be the same information but are in fact different, it'd be a very useful lesson for me and make my users very happy.
Do they echo the same thing when you do:
echo gettype($psusername) . '\n' . gettype($psu_value);
Since i can't see what data is stored in the array $list (and the index $count), I cannot suggest a full solution to yuor problem.
But i can suggest you to insert this code right before the if statement:
var_dump($psusername);
var_dump($psu_value);
and see why the two variables are not identical.
The var_dump function will output the content stored in the variable and the type (string, integer, array ec..), so you will figure out why the if statement is returning false
Since it looks like you have non-printable characters in your string, you can strip them out before the comparison. This will remove whatever is not printable in your character set:
$psusername = preg_replace("/[[:^print:]]/", "", $psusername);
0D 0A is a new line. The first is the carriage return (CR) character and the second is the new line (NL) character. They are also known as \r and \n.
You can just trim it off using trim().
$psusername = trim($psusername);
Or if it only occurs at the end of the string then rtrim() would do the job:
$psusername = rtrim($psusername);
If you are getting the values from the file using file() then you can pass FILE_IGNORE_NEW_LINES as the second argument, and that will remove the new line:
$contents = file('url.db', FILE_IGNORE_NEW_LINES);
I just want to thank all who responded. I realised after viewing my logfile the outputs in HEX format that it was the carriage return values causing the variables to mismatch and a I mentioned was able to resolve (trim) with the following code..
$psusername = preg_replace("/[^[:alnum:]]/u", '', $psusername);
I also know that the system within which the profiles and usernames are created allow both upper and lower case values to match, so I took the precaution of building that functionality into my code as an added measure of completeness.
And I'm happy to say, the code functions perfectly now.
Once again, thanks for your responses and suggestions.
Apologies if there is an obvious answer (and I know there are about 1000 of these similar questions) - but I have spent two days trying to attack this without success. I cannot seem to crack why I get a null response...
Short background: the following works just fine
$xurl= new SimpleXMLElement('https://gptxsw.appspot.com/view/submissionList?formId=GP_v7&numEntries=1', NULL, TRUE);
$keyname = $xurl->idList->id[0];
echo $keyname;
this provides a response: a unique key like uuid:d0721391-6953-4d0b-b981-26e38f05d2e5
however I try a similar request (which ultimately would be based on first request) and get a failure. I've simplified code as follows...
$xdurl= new SimpleXMLElement('https://gptxsw.appspot.com/view/downloadSubmission?formId=GP_v7[#version=null%20and%20#uiVersion=null]/GP_v7[#key=uuid:d0721391-6953-4d0b-b981-26e38f05d2e5]', NULL, TRUE);
$keyname2 = $xdurl->data->GP_v7->SDD_ID_N[0];
echo $keyname2;
this provides null. And if I try something like
echo $xdurl->asXML();
I get an error response from the site (not from PHP).
Do I need to eject from SimpleXMLElement for the second request? I've read about using XPath and about defining the namespace, but I'm not sure that either would be required: the second file does have two namespaces but one of them isn't used and the other has no prefix for elements. Plus I have tried variations of those - enough to think that my problem/error is either more global in nature (or oversight due to inexperience).
For purposes of this request I have no control over the formatting of either XML file.
Here we go: SimpleXMLElement seems to re-escape (or incorrectly handle in some way) already url-escaped characters like white spaces. Try:
$xdurl= new SimpleXMLElement('https://gptxsw.appspot.com/view/downloadSubmission?formId=GP_v7[#version=null and #uiVersion=null]/GP_v7[#key=uuid:d0721391-6953-4d0b-b981-26e38f05d2e5]', NULL, TRUE);
$keyname2 = $xdurl->data->GP_v7->SDD_ID_N[0];
echo $keyname2;
and you should be fine.
(FYI: I debugged this by manually creating a local copy of the XML request result named "foo.xml" which worked perfectly.)
Thanks to #Matze for getting me on right track.
Issue is that URL has special characters that SimpleXMLElement cannot parse without help.
Solution: add urlencode() command like the following
$fixurl = urlencode('https://gptxsw.appspot.com/view/downloadSubmission?formId=GP_v7[#version=null and #uiVersion=null]/GP_v7[#key=uuid:d0721391-6953-4d0b-b981-26e38f05d2e5]');
$xdurl= new SimpleXMLElement($fixurl, NULL, TRUE);
$keyname2 = $xdurl->data->GP_v7->SDD_ID_N[0];
echo $keyname2;
this provided the answer (in this case 958)
I want to extrat the content of a specific div in an external webpage, the div looks like this:
<dt>Win rate</dt><dd><div>50%</div></dd>
My target is the "50%". I'm actually using this php code to extract the content:
function getvalue($parameter,$content){
preg_match($parameter, $content, $match);
return $match[1];
};
$parameter = '#<dt>Score</dt><dd><div>(.*)</div></dd>#';
$content = file_get_contents('https://somewebpage.com');
Everything works fine, the problem is that this method is taking too much time, especially if I've to use it several times with diferents $content.
I would like to know if there's a better (faster, simplier, etc.) way to acomplish the same function? Thx!
You may use DOMDocument::loadHTML and navigate your way to the given node.
$content = file_get_contents('https://somewebpage.com');
$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->loadHTML($content);
Now to get to the desired node, you may use method DOMDocument::getElementsByTagName, e.g.
$dds = $doc->getElementsByTagName('dd');
foreach($dds as $dd) {
// process each <dd> element here, extract inner div and its inner html...
}
Edit: I see a point #pebbl has made about DomDocument being slower. Indeed it is, however, parsing HTML with preg_match is a call for trouble; In that case, I'd also recommend looking at event-driven SAX XML parser. It is much more lightweight, faster and less memory intensive as it does not build a tree. You may take a look at XML_HTMLSax for such a parser.
There are basically three main things you can do to improve the speed of your code:
Off load the external page load to another time (i.e. use cron)
On a linux based server I would know what to suggest but seeing as you use Windows I'm not sure what the equivalent would be, but Cron for linux allows you to fire off scripts at certain schedule time offsets - in the background - so not using a browser. Basically I would recommend that you create a script who's sole purpose is to go and fetch the website pages at a particular time offset (depending on how frequently you need to update your data) and then write those webpages to files on your local system.
$listOfSites = array(
'http://www.something.com/page.htm',
'http://www.something-else.co.uk/index.php',
);
$dirToContainSites = getcwd() . '/sites';
foreach ( $listOfSites as $site ) {
$content = file_get_contents( $site );
/// i've just simply converted the URL into a filename here, there are
/// better ways of handling this, but this at least keeps things simple.
/// the following just converts any non letter or non number into an
/// underscore... so, http___www_something_com_page_htm
$file_name = preg_replace('/[^a-z0-9]/i','_', $site);
file_put_contents( $dirToContainSites . '/' . $file_name, $content );
}
Once you've created this script, you then need to set the server up to execute it as regularly as you need. Then you can modify your front-end script that displays the stats to read from local files, this would give a significant speed increase.
You can find out how to read files from a directory here:
http://uk.php.net/manual/en/function.dir.php
Or the simpler method (but prone to possible problems) is just to re-step your array of sites, convert the URLs to file names using the preg_replace above, and then check for the file's existence in the folder.
Cache the result of calculating your statistics
It's quite likely this being a stats page that you'll want to visit it quite frequently (not as frequent as a public page, but still). If the same page is visited more often than the cron-based script is executed then there is no reason to do all the calculation again. So basically all you have to do to cache your output is do something similar to the following:
$cachedVersion = getcwd() . '/cached/stats.html';
/// check to see if there is a cached version of this page
if ( file_exists($cachedVersion) ) {
/// if so, load it and echo it to the browser
echo file_get_contents($cachedVersion);
}
else {
/// start output buffering so we can catch what we send to the browser
ob_start();
/// DO YOUR STATS CALCULATION HERE AND ECHO IT TO THE BROWSER LIKE NORMAL
/// end output buffering and grab the contents so we now have a string
/// of the page we've just generated
$content = ob_get_contents(); ob_end_clean();
/// write the content to the cached file for next time
file_put_contents($cachedVersion, $content);
echo $content;
}
Once you start caching things you need to be aware of when you should delete or clear your cache - otherwise if you don't your stats output will never change. With regards to this situation, the best time to clear your cache is at the point you go and fetch the external web pages again. So you should add this line to the bottom of your "cron" script.
$cachedVersion = getcwd() . '/cached/stats.html';
unlink( $cachedVersion ); /// will delete the file
There are other speed improvements you could make to the caching system (you could even record the modified times of the external webpages and load only when they have been updated) but I've tried to keep things easy to explain.
Don't use a HTML Parser for this situation
Scanning a HTML file for one particular unique value does not require the use of a fully-blown or even lightweight HTML Parser. Using RegExp incorrectly seems to be one of those things that lots of start-up programmers fall into, and is a question that is always asked. This has led to lots of automatic knee-jerk reactions from more experience coders to automatically adhere to the following logic:
if ( $askedAboutUsingRegExpForHTML ) {
$automatically->orderTheSillyPersonToUse( $HTMLParser );
} else {
$soundAdvice = $think->about( $theSituation );
print $soundAdvice;
}
HTMLParsers should be used when the target within the markup is not so unique, or your pattern to match relies on such flimsy rules that it'll break the second an extra tag or character occurs. They should be used to make your code more reliable, not if you want to speed things up. Even parsers that do not build a tree of all the elements will still be using some form of string searching or regular expression notation, so unless the library-code you are using has been compiled in an extremely optimised manner, it will not beat well coded strpos/preg_match logic.
Considering I have not seen the HTML you are hoping to parse, I could be way off, but from what I've seen of your snippet it should be quite easy to find the value using a combination of strpos and preg_match. Obviously if your HTML is more complex and might have random multiple occurances of <dt>Win rate</dt><dd><div>50%</div></dd> it will cause problems - but even so - a HTMLParser would still have the same problem.
$offset = 0;
/// loop through the occurances of 'Win rate'
while ( ($p = stripos ($html, 'win rate', $offset)) !== FALSE ) {
/// grab out a snippet of the surrounding HTML to speed up the RegExp
$snippet = substr($html, $p, $p + 50 );
/// I've extended your RegExp to try and account for 'white space' that could
/// occur around the elements. The following wont take in to account any random
/// attributes that may appear, so if you find some pages aren't working - echo
/// out the $snippet var using something like "echo '<xmp>'.$snippet.'</xmp>';"
/// and that should show you what is appearing that is breaking the RegExp.
if ( preg_match('#^win\s+rate\s*</dt>\s*<dd>\s*<div>\s*([0-9]+%)\s*<#i', $snippet, $regs) ) {
/// once you are here your % value will be in $regs[1];
break; /// exit the while loop as we have found our 'Win rate'
}
/// reset our offset for the next loop
$offset = $p;
}
Gotchas to be aware of
If you are new to PHP, as you state in a comment above, then the above may seem rather complicated - which it is. What you are trying to do is quite complex, especially if you want to do it optimally and fast. However, if you follow throught the code I've given and research any bits that you aren't sure of / haven't heard of (php.net is your friend), it should give you a better understanding of a good way to achieve what you are doing.
Guessing ahead however, here are some of the problems you might face with the above:
File Permission errors - in order to be able to read and write files to and from the local operating system you will need to have the correct permissions to do so. If you find you can not write files to a particular directory it might be that the host you are using wont allow you to do so. If this is the case you can either contact them to ask about how to get write permission to a folder, or if that isn't possible you can easily change the code above to use a database instead.
I can't see my content - when using output buffering all the echo and print commands do not get sent to the browser, they instead get saved up in memory. PHP should automatically output all the stored content when the script exits, but if you use a command like ob_end_clean() this actually wipes the 'buffer' so all the content is erased. This can lead to confusing situations when you know you are echoing something.. but it just isn't appearing.
(Mini Disclaimer :) I've typed all the above manually so you may find there are PHP errors, if so, and they are baffling, just write them back here and StackOverflow can help you out)
Instead of trying to not use preg_match why not just trim your document contents down in size? for example, you could dump everything before <body and everything after </body>. then preg_match will be searching less content already.
Also, you could try to do each one of these processes as a pseudo separate thread, so that way they aren't happening one at a time.
I am trying to delete a string from a string, but the result of strstr is not finding the string. I will try to be as clear as I can here....
The problem is strpos() is not finding $deletTabHTML. I have alerted it in ajax and it is exactly the same as a line in the commonHTML, but obviously it isn't for some reason I cannot figure out. I am assuming I am missing something 'invisible'? My script works if I hardcode the html to be deleted, so the overall script works.
here is the php:
$commonHTML = file_get_contents($url);
if (!empty($_POST['action']) && $_POST['action'] == 'deleteTab') {
$deletTabHTML = trim($_POST['theHTM']);
if(strpos($commonHTML, $deletTabHTML) !== false) {
$is_deleted="deleted";
}else{
$is_deleted="NOT deleted, ERROR:".$deletTabHTML;
}
echo '{"is_deleted":"' . $is_deleted . '"}';
return;
}
MORE INFO:
jQuery is getting an element from the dom and sending it to a php script which is opening a file and deleting the element:
<li id="contact">Contact</li>
The data returned to ajax is:
<li id="contact">Contact</li>
but for some reason it is not finding it. Thos were copied and pasted from the actual file and a javascript alert. They look exactly the same.
I hope that is enough info.
strpos is case sensitive
Try
stripos()
Aside from attempting to make the text search case insensitive, you also might want to make sure that it contains no unicode characters by using utf8_decode() on it first.
Lastly, it couldn't hurt to do some sanity checks on $_POST['theHTM'] before attempting to use it. (It looks like it's missing an L at the end, but it's also worth using isset() to verify that it actually exists.)
I am trying to parse the json output from
http://www.nyc.gov/portal/apps/311_contentapi/services/all.json
And my php json_decode returns a NULL
I am not sure where the issue is, I tried running a small subset of the data through JSONLint and it validated the json.
Any Ideas?
The error is in this section:
{
"id":"2002-12-05-22-24-56_000010083df0188b4001eb56",
"service_name":"Outdoor Electric System Complaint",
"expiration":"2099-12-31T00:00:00Z",
"brief_description":"Report faulty Con Edison equipment, including dangling or corroded power lines or "hot spots.""
}
See where it says "hot spots." in an already quoted string. Those "'s should've been escaped. Since you don't have access to edit the JSON perhaps you could do a search for "hot spots."" and replace it with \"hot spots.\"" like str_replace('"hot spots.""', '\\"hot spots.\\""\, $str); for as long as that's in there. Of course that only helps if this is a one time thing. If the site continues to make errors in their JSON output you'll have to come up with something more complex.
What I did to identify the errors in the JSON ...
Since faulty quoting is the first thing to look for, I downloaded the JSON to a text file, opened in a text editor (I used vim but any full featured editor would do), ran a search and replace that removed all characters except double-quote and looked at the result. It was clear that correct lines should have 4 double-quotes so I simply searched for 5 double-quotes together and found the first bad line. I noted the line number and then undid the search and replace to get the original file back and looked at that line. This gives you what you need to get the developers of the API to fix the JSON.
Writing code to automatically fix the bad JSON before giving it to json_decode() would be quite a bit harder but doable using techniques like those in another answer.
According to the PHP manual:
In the event of a failure to decode, json_last_error() can be used to determine the exact nature of the error.
Try calling it to see where the error is.