Populate dropdown list from xml file?

3stripe · January 2006

Does anyone know how to do this via php? (Can only find .NET examples so far)

NickE · January 2006

Couldn't you just parse the XML file then generate the HTML accordingly?

3stripe · January 2006

Hmmm maybe, looks complicated though :-?

3stripe · January 2006

Found something at Kirupa that might do the trick: http://www.kirupa.com/web/xml_php_parse_intermediate.htm

Mark · January 2006

I recently wrote a little function that parses an xml file one-level deep and returns an object with property->value pairs:

// An empty shell for housing an xml response.
class XMLResponse {}

function ParseXmlFile($FileLocation) {
      $Lines = file($FileLocation);
      $XML = new XMLResponse();
   
      // Loop through each of the lines of the response and get the
      // properties/values
      for ($i = 0; $i < count($Lines); $i++) {
         $Matches = false;
         preg_match("/(<([^<>\s]*)(\s[^<>]*)?>)(.+?)(<([^<>\s]*)(\s[^<>]*)?>)/",
            $Lines[$i],
            $Matches);
         if (count($Matches) == 7) {
            $Property = $Matches[2];
            $Value = $Matches[4];
            $XML->$Property = $Value;         
         }     
      }
      return $XML;
   }
}

/* Assuming the xml file contains something like this:

      <root>
         <status>ok</status>
         <id>123456</id>
         <username>marky</username>
      </root>
*/

$MyXml = ParseXmlFile("/path/to/my/xml/file.xml");

echo($MyXml->username." has an id of ".$MyXml->id." and has a status of ".$MyXml->status);

/*
Will Print:
marky has an id of 123456 and has a status of ok
*/

Bergamot · January 2006

Does the XML have to be in any specific format? if not, it could literally be a textdump of the option tags you need, provided it conformed to xml rules.

3stripe · January 2006

The XML is coming from a http://www.slideshowpro.net/ config file which has to go something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<gallery>

    <album id="flowers" title="" description="Photos of flowers"> />
    </album>
    
    <album id="cars" title="" description="Photos of cars"> />
    </album>

    <album id="animals" title="" description="Photos of erm, animals"> />
    </album>
    
</gallery>

3stripe · January 2006

PS. Once I've got this working I need to somehow turn it into a Wordpress extension so that you can automatically insert a link into a post that points to one of the album ids. But that's a post for the Wordpress forum methinks!

Populate dropdown list from xml file?

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