Using a form to append Nodes to XML using PHP - php

Question

I'm really new to PHP and Im trying to append Nodes to XML using PHP.
This is my comments.php file:
<?php
$date = "http://jdrag.x10.mx/comments_file.xml";
$xml = simplexml_load_string($data);
$commentt = $xml->addChild("comment");
$name = $_POST["cname"];
$email = $_POST["cemail"];
$comment = $_POST["comment"];
$commentt->addChild("name", $name);
$commentt->addChild("email", $email);
$commentt->addChild("commentInside", $comment);
echo $xml->saveXML();
?>
My comments.html is:
<form action="comments.php" method="post">
Name: <input type="text" name="cname" />
Email: <input type="text" name="cemail" />
Comment: <input type="text" name="comment" />
<input type="submit" />
</form>
As you can see my XML file is simple the comments tag: http://jdrag.x10.mx/comments_file.xml
But when I submit the form I get this error:
Fatal error: Call to a member function addChild() on a non-object in /home/jdragx10/public_html/comments.php on line 5
And because i'm new to PHP I really don't know what it means or how to fix it.
Thanks in advance to anyone who can fix my code.

Answer 1

It looks like you want to be using simplexml_load_file().
The simplexml_load_string() function takes the XML document as a string whereas simplexml_load_file() takes the path to a file containing the XML, as you have.
You also have some problem with variable names, the path to the XML file is held in $date whereas you try to load the XML using the variable $data.
Finally, be sure to turn on (and to the maximum level) error reporting while you are writing your code. The code above gives a notice message ("Notice: Undefined variable: data…"), not just a fatal error message.
Set the values display_errors and error_reporting to On and -1 respectively, either in your php.ini file or using ini_set().