Trouble parsing XML response from curl_exec - php

Question

I am submitting the contents of an HTML form to a 3rd-party service using cURL, and it shoots me back an XML response. But no matter what I'm doing I can't seem to parse that XML response to customize the display of the results.
Here is the code for processing the form (note a few ID numbers have been censored):
<?php
$FirstName = $_POST['FirstName'] ;
$LastName = $_POST['LastName'] ;
$Zip = $_POST['Zip'] ;
$EmailAddress = $_POST['EmailAddress'] ;
$PrimaryPhoneNumber = $_POST['PrimaryPhoneNumber'] ;
$DateofBirth = $_POST['DateofBirth'] ;
$myvars = '&VID=' . '****' . '&LID=' . '****' . '&AID=' . '****' . '&FirstName=' . $FirstName . '&LastName=' . $LastName .
'&EmailAddress=' . $EmailAddress . '&PrimaryPhoneNumber=' . $PrimaryPhoneNumber . '&Zip=' . $Zip . '&DateofBirth=' . $DateofBirth;
if ($FirstName!='' && $LastName!='' && $Zip!='' && $EmailAddress!='' && $PrimaryPhoneNumber!='' && $DateofBirth!='') {
$c = curl_init();
curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://secure.leadexec.net/leadimport.asmx/LeadReceiver');
curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_POST, true);
curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $myvars);
curl_exec ($c);
curl_close ($c);
} else {
echo '<p>Please make sure you have filled out the form completely</p>';
}
?>
This is the raw output of the response I get back:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<PostResponse xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns="http://www.leadproweb.com/">
<isValidPost>false</isValidPost>
<ResponseType>Duplicate_Lead</ResponseType>
<ResponseDetails>Duplicate Lead, Last Received On: 9/27/2013 2:17:26 PM</ResponseDetails>
<LeadIdentifier>20889333</LeadIdentifier>
<VendorAccountAssigned>0</VendorAccountAssigned>
<PendingQCReview>false</PendingQCReview>
<Price>0</Price>
<RedirectURL />
</PostResponse>
When I try using methods like SimpleXmlElement or simplexml_load_string() to parse the XML, they seem to be ignored and I can't get rid of the raw XML output unless I remove the curl_exec($c) line.
Is there something I am doing wrong?

Answer 1

You need to add
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
to get the value (string) of the response; otherwise, curl_exec just returns a boolean (success/failure). See http://php.net/manual/en/function.curl-exec.php
Then you replace the line
curl_exec( $c );
with
$response = curl_exec( $c );
And finally you parse the response string with a parser of your choice.