Unable to parse xml data with colon (:) from response using getNamespaces()

Question

I want to read whatever is inside the <q:content></q:content> tags in the following xml -

$xml = '<?xml version="1.0"?>
                    <q:response xmlns:q="http://api-url">
                        <q:impression>
                            <q:content>
                                <html>
                                    <head>
                                        <meta name="HandheldFriendly" content="True">
                                        <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, user-scalable=no">
                                        <meta http-equiv="cleartype" content="on">
                                    </head>
                                    <body style="margin:0px;padding:0px;">
                                        <iframe scrolling="no" src="http://some-url" width="320px" height="50px" style="border:none;"></iframe>
                                    </body>
                                </html>
                            </q:content>
                            <q:cpc>0.02</q:cpc>
                        </q:impression>
                    ...
                        ... some more things
                    ...
                    </q:response>';

I have put the xml in the variable above and then I use SimpleXMLElement::getNamespaces as given in the section "Example #1 Get document namespaces in use" -

//code continued
$dom = new DOMDocument;
 // load the XML string defined above
$dom->loadXML($xml);

var_dump($dom->getElementsByTagNameNS('http://api-url', '*') ); // shows object(DOMNodeList)#3 (0) { } 


foreach ($dom->getElementsByTagNameNS('http://api-url', '*') as $element) 
{
    //this does not execute
    echo 'see - local name: ', $element->localName, ', prefix: ', $element->prefix, "\n";
}

But the code inside the for loop does not execute.

I have read these questions -

Update
Also tried this solution Parse XML with Namespace using SimpleXML -

$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($xml);
$xml->registerXPathNamespace('e', 'http://api-url');

foreach($xml->xpath('//e:q') as $event) {
    echo "not coming here";
    $event->registerXPathNamespace('e', 'http://api-url');
    var_export($event->xpath('//e:content'));
}

In this case too, the code inside the foreach does not execute. Not sure if I wrote everything correct ...

Further Update
Going with the first solution ... with error_reporting = -1, found that the problem is with the URL in the src attr of the iframe tag. Getting warnings like -

Warning: DOMDocument::loadXML(): EntityRef: expecting ';' in Entity, line: 13

Updated code -

$xml = '<?xml version="1.0"?>
                    <q:response xmlns:q="http://api-url">
                        <q:impression>
                            <q:content>
                                <html>
                                    <head>
                                        <meta name="HandheldFriendly" content="True" />
                                        <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, user-scalable=no" />
                                        <meta http-equiv="cleartype" content="on" />
                                    </head>
                                    <body style="margin:0px;padding:0px;">
                                        <iframe scrolling="no" src="http://serve.qriously.com/v1/request?type=SERVE&aid=ratingtest&at=2&uid=0000000000000000&noHash=true&testmode=true&ua=Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.2.1; en-us; Nexus One Build/FRG83) AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1&appid=12e2561f048158249e30000012e256826ad&pv=2&rf=2&src=admarvel&type=get&lang=eng" width="320px" height="50px" style="border:none;"></iframe>
                                    </body>
                                </html>
                            </q:content>
                            <q:cpc>0.02</q:cpc>
                        </q:impression>
                        <q:app_stats>
                                <q:total><q:ctr>0.023809523809523808</q:ctr><q:ecpm>0.5952380952380952</q:ecpm></q:total>
                                <q:today><q:ctr>0.043478260869565216</q:ctr><q:ecpm>1.0869565217391306</q:ecpm></q:today>
                        </q:app_stats>
                    </q:response>';

The codeblock inside the foreach does not execute because the DOMNodeList is empty. The foreach does execute, but as there are not elements to iterate over, the code block inside is skipped. I suggest you put it into a variable of it's own first to make it easier to debug. — hakre
– hakre, Commented Jul 12, 2011 at 14:07
No problem, just wanted to make that clear. The function works as it should, but you're not creating the document properly, see my answer. — hakre
– hakre, Commented Jul 12, 2011 at 14:12

Community · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-23 10:27:17Z

4

I have no problem to get it to work, the only error I could find is that you're loading XML containing a non-XML HTML chunk in there which is breaking the document: The meta elements in the head section are not closed.

See Demo.

Tip: Always activate error logging and reporting, check for warnings and notices if you develop and debug code. A short one-line displaying all sort of PHP error messages incl. warnings, notices and strict:

error_reporting(-1); ini_set('display_errors', 1);

DOMDocument is talkative then about malformed elements when loading XML.

Fixing the XML "on the fly"

DomDocument accepts only valid XML. If you've got HTML you can alternatively try if DOMDocument::loadHTML() does the job as well, however it will convert the loaded string into a X(HT)ML document then. Probably not what you're looking for.

To escape a specific part of the string to load to make it XML compatible you can search for string patterns to obtain the substring that represents the HTML inside the XML and properly XML encode it.

E.g. you can look for <html> and </html> as the surrounding tags, extract the substring of the whole and replace it with substr_replace(). To encode the HTML for being used as data inside the XML, use the htmlspecialchars() function, it will replace everything with the five entities in the other SO answer.

Some mock-up code:

$htmlStart = strpos($xml, '<html>');
if (false === $htmlStart) throw new Exception('<html> not found.');
$htmlEnd = strpos($xml, '</html>', $htmlStart);
if (false === $htmlStart) throw new Exception('</html> not found.');
$htmlLen = $htmlEnd - $htmlStart + 7;
$htmlString = substr($xml, $htmlStart, $htmlLen);
$htmlEscaped = htmlspecialchars($htmlString, ENT_QUOTES);
$xml = substr_replace($xml, $htmlEscaped, $htmlStart, $htmlLen);

edited May 23, 2017 at 10:27

CommunityBot

11 silver badge

answered Jul 12, 2011 at 14:10

hakre

200k55 gold badges454 silver badges866 bronze badges

Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

9 Comments

Aaron Ray Over a year ago

I think you are technically supposed to escape some of those HTML characters. See this article: stackoverflow.com/questions/1091945/…

hakre Over a year ago

@Aaron Ray: Not in case it's actual X(HT)ML.

Sandeepan Nath Over a year ago

@hakre, I too am able to run the code here codepad.org/XVEx5Ay4. I have closed the meta tags and getting no more warning. Not getting why is it not running here on my system. I have also set ini_set("error_reporting", "E_ALL"); just before that part (to make sure). I am not getting any errors displayed.

hakre Over a year ago

Try error_reporting(-1); ini_set('display_errors', 1); Then double-check your XML is correct.

hakre Over a year ago

@Sandeepan Nath: Updated the answer. And about E_ALL - no it does not. It perhaps will again for PHP 5.4 or higher, but right now the constant name is totally misleading. That's why i normally suggest -1 which is the workaround.

|

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

Unable to parse xml data with colon (:) from response using getNamespaces()

1 Answer 1

Fixing the XML "on the fly"

9 Comments

Your Answer

Linked

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

1 Answer 1

Fixing the XML "on the fly"

9 Comments

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Post as a guest

Linked

Related