SQL data to XML file - php

Question

Is it possible to save the below output to an XML file as its currently just displayed in the source?
$host = "localhost"; // host name
$user = "#"; // database user name
$pass = "#"; // database password
$database = "#"; // database name
// connecting to database
$connect = #mysql_connect($host,$user,$pass)or die (#mysql_error());
// selecting database
#mysql_select_db($database,$connect) or die (#mysql_error());
// default header(don't delete)
header("Content-Type: text/xml;charset=iso-8859-1");
echo '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">';
// mytable = your content table name
$query = #mysql_query("SELECT * FROM urls");
while($row = #mysql_fetch_array($query)){
// [url] = content url
$url = $row['url'];
// [time] = content date
$date = date("Y-m-d", $row['time']);
// NO CHANGES BELOW
echo
'<url>
<loc>' . $url .'</loc>
<lastmod>'. $date .'</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
';
}
echo '</urlset>';
I know I can use .htaccess to make the file be seen as an XML format however I want the data to be saved onto an actual file.

Answer 1

You could try changing each echo to append the line to a string variable, for example:
// Instead of
echo '<?xml version="1.0"?>';
echo '<url>';
// etc.
$xml = '<?xml version="1.0"?>';
$xml .= '<url>';
// and so on
Then use one of the file functions to save to a file. file_put_contents is a simple method:
file_put_contents("/path/to/file.xml", $xml);
A more robust solution, if you want to take this further, could be to use the DOM module to build the XML structure:
$document = new DOMDocument("1.0");
$root = $document->createElement("urlset");
$root->setAttribute("xmlns", "http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9");
$document->appendChild($root);
while ($row = mysql_query($query)) {
$item = $document->createElement("url");
$root->append($item);
// etc.
}
echo $document->saveXML();

Answer 2

NOTE: This answer assumes that by "save file" you mean "trigger the Save As dialog in the browser when someone views the page".
text/xml isn't really the correct content-type. You really should at least application/xml for generic XML or the appropriate content type for XML sub-formats such as RSS or docx.
If you want to trigger a file download dialog in the client browser, then you also need to send a content-disposition header that tells the browser that you want it to download the file and give a preferred filename.
There are some issues with your code that need addressing too.
Overuse of # for error suppression. This is a bad idea for a huge variety of reasons. Remove the # operators and handle any generated errors in a more robust way.
Your character encoding heading specifies one character set (latin-1) but your XML preamble specifies a totally different one (UTF-8). That's a recipe for disaster.

Answer 3

Use output buffers
ob_start();
... do everything you actually did before ...
$content = ob_get_contents();
ob_end_clean();
//Write to a file
file_put_contents('filename.xml', $content);
And thats all...

Answer 4

Using fwrite it should be straight forward :
$f = fopen('data.xml', 'w'); //open a file for writing
fwrite($f, $myxmltext); // write some things to it
fclose($f); // close it when finished