CURL result into PHP array? - php

Question

The code below sends XML via CURL using POST with a http header of text/xml. The server responds by echoing $ch_result. I am making a call to this file via AJAX as the content of the returned XML file will need to be displayed on the client-side. Is there anyway I can get this XML file into an array so I can use json_encode and have it return like that? I need this content to be easy to manipulate using JavaScript as the XML file returned is large... so an array might be best?
Thanks!
<?php
$xml_builder = '
MY XML POSTED TO SERVER GOES HERE';
$ch = curl_init('http://username:password#myserver.blabla/api');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array('Content-Type: text/xml'));
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $xml_builder);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, 'http://www.mydomain.co.uk');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$ch_result = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
echo $ch_result;
?>

Answer 1

You can parse the XML on server side, but also on client side.
On server side:
Simple and dirty way:
<?php
$a = json_decode(json_encode((array) simplexml_load_string($s)),1);
?>
however, please read this article:
http://gaarf.info/2009/08/13/xml-string-to-php-array/
On client side:
If you are using jQuery you can set dataType to xml, and can parse the xml on client side with jQuery:
How to parse XML using jQuery?
To parse xml using jquery you must echo: htmlentities($ch_result) so that the XML is echoed with the tags etc.