PHP: how to load file from different server as string? - php

Question

I am trying to load an XML file from a different domain name as a string. All I want is an array of the text within the < title >< /title > tags of the xml file, so I am thinking since I am using php4 the easiest way would be to do a regex on it to get them. Can someone explain how to load the XML as a string? Thanks!

Answer 1

You could use cURL like the example below. I should add that regex-based XML parsing is generally not a good idea, and you may be better off using a real parser, especially if it gets any more complicated.
You may also want to add some regex modifiers to make it work across multiple lines etc., but I assume the question is more about fetching the content into a string.
<?php
$curl = curl_init('http://www.example.com');
//make content be returned by curl_exec rather than being printed immediately
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$result = curl_exec($curl);
if ($result !== false) {
if (preg_match('|<title>(.*)</title>|i', $result, $matches)) {
echo "Title is '{$matches[1]}'";
} else {
//did not find the title
}
} else {
//request failed
die (curl_error($curl));
}

Answer 2

first use
file_get_contents('http://www.example.com/');
to get the file,
insert in to var.
after parse the xml
the link is
http://php.net/manual/en/function.xml-parse.php
have example in the comments

Answer 3

If you're loading well-formed xml, skip the character-based parsing, and use the DOM functions:
$d = new DOMDocument;
$d->load("http://url/file.xml");
$titles = $d->getElementsByTagName('title');
if ($titles) {
echo $titles->item(0)->nodeValue;
}
If you can't use DOMDocument::load() due to how php is set up, the use curl to grab the file and then do:
$d = new DOMDocument;
$d->loadXML($grabbedfile);
...

Answer 4

I have this function as a snippet:
function getHTML($url) {
if($url == false || empty($url)) return false;
$options = array(
CURLOPT_URL => $url, // URL of the page
CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true, // return web page
CURLOPT_HEADER => false, // don't return headers
CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION => true, // follow redirects
CURLOPT_ENCODING => "", // handle all encodings
CURLOPT_USERAGENT => "spider", // who am i
CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER => true, // set referer on redirect
CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT => 120, // timeout on connect
CURLOPT_TIMEOUT => 120, // timeout on response
CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS => 3, // stop after 3 redirects
);
$ch = curl_init( $url );
curl_setopt_array( $ch, $options );
$content = curl_exec( $ch );
$header = curl_getinfo( $ch );
curl_close( $ch );
//Ending all that cURL mess...
//Removing linebreaks,multiple whitespace and tabs for easier Regexing
$content = str_replace(array("\n", "\r", "\t", "\o", "\xOB"), '', $content);
$content = preg_replace('/\s\s+/', ' ', $content);
$this->profilehtml = $content;
return $content;
}
That returns the HTML with no linebreaks, tabs, multiple spaces, etc, only 1 line.
So now you do this preg_match:
$html = getHTML($url)
preg_match('|<title>(.*)</title>|iUsm',$html,$matches);
and $matches[1] will have the info you need.