xml

I’m one of the few people who loves Safari, but I was happy to admit that it didn’t display XML or JSON very well. Marc Liyanage’s XML View Plugin fixes that.

I needed a quick, perhaps even sloppy way to output an array as XML. Some Googling turned up a few tools, including Simon Willison’s XmlWriter, Johnny Brochard’s Array 2 XML, Roger Veciana Associative array to XML, and Gijs van Tulder’s Array to XML. Finally, Gijs also pointed me to the XML_Serializer PEAR Package.

In an example of how even the smallest barriers can turn people away, I completely ignored the two possible solutions at PHP Classes, because navigating and using the site sucks. I passed on Willison’s function because, well, it didn’t look like it would do enough of what I wanted. Despite Gijs’ recommendation of the PEAR module, I was happy enough to use his array_to_xml function, as it did what I needed and required the lest work for the moment. I may revisit XML_Serializer sometime, but…

I didn’t hear big announcement of it, but [deep in the docs][1] (? PHP 5.1.0) you’ll find a note about [additional Libxml parameters][2]. In there you’ll learn about “LIBXML_NOCDATA,” and it works like this:

simplexml_load_string($xmlraw, ‘SimpleXMLElement’, LIBXML_NOCDATA);

Without that option (and with all previous versions of PHP/SimpleXML), SimpleXML just ignores any < ![CDATA[...]]> ‘escaped’ content, such as you’ll find in most every blog feed.



 [1]: http://us3.php.net/manual/en/function.simplexml-load-string.php
 [2]: http://us3.php.net/manual/en/ref.libxml.php#libxml.constants "additional Libxml parameters"

Everybody likes documentation. The Zend folks posted this overview and SimpleXML introduction The O’Reilly folks at ONLamp offered this guide to using SimpleXML. Of course, there’s always the SimpleXML docs at PHP.net.

Two problems: I haven’t encountered CDATA in my XML yet, but I do hope to develop a better solution than offered here when I do. The other is that SimpleXML chokes on illegal characters, a unfortunately common occurrence in documents coming from III’s XML Server.

The Zend overview of the new XML features in PHP 5 has re-energized me for building XML Server Applications at my library.

Interesting: Cladonia Exchanger XML Editor, a Java-based app that makes reading raw XML easy. Much easier than in a regular text editor, even with syntax highlighting.

Flash app dynamically generates charts based on XML formated data or values in a PHP array.

XML/SWF Charts is a simple, yet powerful tool to create attractive web charts and graphs from dynamic XML data. Create an XML source to describe a chart, then pass it to this tool’s flash file to generate the chart. The same tool also accepts PHP sources. XML/SWF Charts makes the best of both the XML and SWF worlds. XML provides flexible data generation, and Flash provides the best graphic quality.

More info here.

WordPress’s XML-RPC support looks pretty good. Heck, it supports a half dozen APIs and works well with ecto … except for tag support, which is my only complaint with it so far.

The Movable Type API supports a “keywords” field that I’m thinking can be hijacked as a “tags” field instead, but while ecto sends the goods — I can see them in the XML-RPC data that gets sent out, WordPress seems to ignore them upon receipt. So I’m looking around the WordPress plugin API docs for a solution, but all I can find is an undocumented mention of xmlrpc_methods in Skippy’s list of plugin hooks.