PHP Parse XML issues when XML has variables

Question

Pls see snippet of XML file below:

<products>
<product>
<id>2589527</id>
<name>Samsung PS42C450</name>
<manufacturer>Samsung</manufacturer>
<manufacturer-id>22</manufacturer-id>
<description>42 in, Widescreen, Plasma, HD Ready, Samsung DNIe+ ,</description>
<category>Sound and Vision &gt; Vision &gt; TVs</category>
<category-id>2</category-id>
<number-of-retailers>16</number-of-retailers>
<image-url height="217" width="300">http://images.pricerunner.com/product/300x217/101294172/Samsung-PS42C450.jpg</image-url>
<rating type="average">
  <average>4,1</average>
</rating>
<rating type="professional">
  <average>4,1</average>
  <num-ratings>1</num-ratings>
</rating>
<lowest-price currency="GBP">354.44</lowest-price>
<highest-price currency="GBP">549.00</highest-price>
</product>
</products>

I'm having problems parsing image-url, lowest-price and highest-price

I'm trying:

$lowprice = $products->lowest-price;

$highprice = $products->highest-price;

$imageURL = $products->image-url;

But they are returning nothing - any ideas what I'm doing wrong?

$url = 'http://*********/feedoutput.xml'; $filecontent = file_get_contents($url); $xml = simplexml_load_file($url) or die("feed not loading"); foreach ($xml->product as $products) { etc. etc. — StudioTime
– StudioTime, Commented Sep 30, 2011 at 19:24

Shai Mishali · Accepted Answer · 2011-09-30 19:11:40Z

1

use $products->{'lowest-price'}. (with curly braces you can use special characters such as the minus sign)

Shai.

answered Sep 30, 2011 at 19:11

Shai Mishali

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Marc B · Accepted Answer · 2011-09-30 19:15:16Z

1

$products->lowest-price;

PHP will interpret as

($products->lowest)  minus price;

There's no "lowest" in your $products object, and price is almost certainly not a defined constant, so both show up as null, get cast to 0's, and end up producing 0-0=0

answered Sep 30, 2011 at 19:15

Marc B

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Aurimas · Accepted Answer · 2011-09-30 19:14:03Z

0

It's probably because of the dash (assuming other properties work). Try encapsulating them with curly braces, like

$products->{highest-price};

answered Sep 30, 2011 at 19:14

Aurimas

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2 Comments

Shai Mishali Over a year ago

Aurimas, your example is looking for a key which is the result of highest minus price (an expression that doesn't exist) . When searching for a "stringed" key , you should use ' sign (like in my answer above' $products->{'highest-price'}

Aurimas Over a year ago

absolutely true, Shai, I missed it!

salathe · Accepted Answer · 2011-09-30 19:49:26Z

There are (maybe) two unrelated issues.

1. XML structure

Your (broken) code, e.g. $products->lowest-price is wanting to access the lowest-price element which is a child of $products. Assuming the variable is named after the element, you have a little more work to do. The XML is structured like

<products>
 └─ <product>
     └─ <lowest-price>

So if $products is the `products> element, then three steps are needed.

$products->product->lowest-price

The above may be a non-issue, and simply unfortunate variable naming.

2. Dash (-) in element name

When presented with $a->b-c, PHP sees that as $a->b <minus> c as b-c is not a valid label (and no a valid object property name). As noted on the "SimpleXML Basic usage" manual page (link), the appropriate solution is to use the variable property syntax ala.

$products->product->{'lowest-price'}

See: http://php.net/simplexml.examples-basic (Example #3)

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