How to print an XML file to the screen in PHP?
This is not working:
$curl = curl_init();
curl_setopt ($curl, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://rss.news.yahoo.com/rss/topstories');
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$result = curl_exec ($curl);
curl_close ($curl);
$xml = simplexml_load_string($result);
echo $xml;
Is there a simple solution? Maybe without SimpleXML?
You can use HTTP URLs as if they were local files, thanks to PHP's wrappers
You can get the contents from an URL via file_get_contents() and then echo it, or even read it directly using readfile()
$file = file_get_contents('http://example.com/rss');
echo $file;
or
readfile('http://example.com/rss');
Don't forget to set the correct MIME type before outputing anything, though.
header('Content-type: text/xml');
echo htmlentities($file) in order to display the raw XML (tags and content). Is there a better way?Here's what worked for me:
<pre class="prettyprint linenums">
<code class="language-xml"><?php echo htmlspecialchars(file_get_contents("example.xml"), ENT_QUOTES); ?></code>
</pre>
Using htmlspecialchars will prevent tags from being displayed as html and won't break anything. Note that I'm using Prettyprint to highlight the code ;)
You can use the asXML method
echo $xml->asXML();
You can also give it a filename
$xml->asXML('filename.xml');
header('Content-type: text/xml');This worked for me:
echo(header('content-type: text/xml'));
If you just want to print the raw XML you don't need Simple XML. I added some error handling and a simple example of how you might want to use SimpleXML.
<?php
$curl = curl_init();
curl_setopt ($curl, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://rss.news.yahoo.com/rss/topstories');
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$result = curl_exec ($curl);
if ($result === false) {
die('Error fetching data: ' . curl_error($curl));
}
curl_close ($curl);
//we can at this point echo the XML if you want
//echo $result;
//parse xml string into SimpleXML objects
$xml = simplexml_load_string($result);
if ($xml === false) {
die('Error parsing XML');
}
//now we can loop through the xml structure
foreach ($xml->channel->item as $item) {
print $item->title;
}
Am I oversimplifying this?
$location = "http://rss.news.yahoo.com/rss/topstories";
print file_get_contents($location);
Some places (like digg.com) won't allow you to access their site without having a user-agent, in which case you would need to set that with ini_set() prior to running the file_get_contents().
To display the html/xml "as is" (i.e. all entities and elements), simply escape the characters <, &, and enclose the result with <pre>:
$XML = '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<root>
<foo>ó</foo>
<bar>ó</bar>
</root>';
$XML = str_replace('&', '&', $XML);
$XML = str_replace('<', '<', $XML);
echo '<pre>' . $XML . '</pre>';
Prints:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<root>
<foo>ó</foo>
<bar>ó</bar>
</root>
Tested on Chrome 45
If anyone is targeting yahoo rss feed may benefit from this snippet
<?php
$rssUrl="http://news.yahoo.com/rss/topstories";
//====================================================
$xml=simplexml_load_file($rssUrl) or die("Error: Cannot create object");
//====================================================
$featureRss = array_slice(json_decode(json_encode((array) $xml ), true ), 0 );
/*Just to see what is in it
use this function PrettyPrintArray()
instead of var_dump($featureRss);*/
function PrettyPrintArray($rssData, $level) {
foreach($rssData as $key => $Items) {
for($i = 0; $i < $level; $i++)
echo(" ");
/*if content more than one*/
if(!is_array($Items)){
//$Items=htmlentities($Items);
$Items=htmlspecialchars($Items);
echo("Item " .$key . " => " . $Items . "<br/><br/>");
}
else
{
echo($key . " => <br/><br/>");
PrettyPrintArray($Items, $level+1);
}
}
}
PrettyPrintArray($featureRss, 0);
?>
You may want to run it in your browser first to see what is there and before looping and style it up pretty simple
To grab the first item description
<?php
echo($featureRss['channel']['item'][0]['description']);
?>
This works:
<?php
$XML = "<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
<!-- Your XML -->
";
header('Content-Type: application/xml; charset=utf-8');
echo ($XML);
?>
The best solution is to add to your apache .htaccess file the following line after RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^sitemap\.xml$ sitemap.php [L]
and then simply having a file sitemap.php in your root folder that would be normally accessible via http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml, the default URL where all search engines will firstly search.
The file sitemap.php shall start with
<?php
//Saturday, 11 January 2020 @kevin
header('Content-type: text/xml');
echo '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>';
?>
<urlset
xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9
http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd">
<url>
<loc>https://www.yoursite.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2020-01-08T13:06:14+00:00</lastmod>
<priority>1.00</priority>
</url>
</urlset>
it works :)
If you simply want to display it on a web page (e.g. within HTML) I use <pre><xmp>$xml</xmp></pre>
