Reputation: 1065

Parse XML received from a GET request

As a part of a school project, i am making a call of the school's api.

Method: GET Response Format: Xml

Now i use curl to make the web request.

$ch=curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL,$url);

curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);

$data=curl_exec($ch);

curl_close($ch);

Now how do i parse the xml output to get the data i want?

Hope the question is clear

Upvotes: 1

Answers (4)

Nemoden

Reputation: 9056

Take a look at SimpleXML, DOMDocument, XMLParser and XPath. I usually prefer SimpleXML, but as many people, as many opinions...

You will find lots of examples in the documentation to this PHP classes.

Upvotes: 1

lonesomeday

Reputation: 237817

This depends on the exact nature of the content and, moreover, its structure.

The basics are to use DOMDocument (or, alternatively, simplexml, which I dislike as an API) to parse the document, then to use DOM traversal or XPath to find the content you want.

An example might look like this:

$dom = new DOMDocument;
$dom->loadXML($data); // data from cURL request

$xpath = new DOMXPath($dom);

$names = $xpath->query('//student/name'); // find all name elements that are direct children of student elements

foreach ($names as $name) {
    echo $name->nodeValue;
}

The exact code you want depends on the structure of the XML and what content you want to get out of it.

Upvotes: 2