PHP XML. IP validation - php

Question

My Xml looks like this example:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Allvotes>
<vote score="2" ip="116.971.203.221"/>
<vote score="5" ip="32.97.233.5"/>
<vote score="3" ip="212.977.233.225"/>
<vote score="5" ip="2.80.233.225"/>
</Allvotes>
When on my flash website (AS2), somebody press "vote" button, script in PHP getting his IP... What I want is run specyfic function, depends on his IP exist in xml file or not.
If his IP already exist, PHP send message: "ALREADY VOTED!", when IP doesn't exist in XML, then I want to run function which store his vote score and IP in xml.
So far I know that this PHP script not works:
$dom = new DomDocument('1.0', 'UTF-8');
$myXML = "votes.xml";
$s="";
if ($_POST['todo']=="vote"){
$ip=$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
$dom->load($myXML);
$allVotes= $dom->getElementsByTagName('vote');
foreach ($allVotes as $vote){
if ($vote->getAttribute('ip')==$ip){
$s.="&msg= Already Voted";
echo $s;
break;
}else{
doOtherStuff
}
}
}
The problem is that this loop fire "doOtherStuff" function when IP is not in first node...
Is there any magic trick to do that?

Answer 1

Why your code does not work
To answer the immediate question: you need to defer the "already voted?" test until you have iterated over all the records:
$alreadyVoted = false;
foreach ($allVotes as $vote){
if ($vote->getAttribute('ip')==$ip){
$alreadyVoted = true;
break;
}
}
if($alreadyVoted) {
$s.="&msg= Already Voted";
echo $s;
}
else {
// other stuff
}
Why you should not do it this way
Storing your data in XML like this is a really inefficient way of doing things. You should move the data store to a database (MySql is typically easiest to set up and work with from PHP).