XmlWriter: Generating XML from PHP

Lars Marius Garshol’s XMLWriter class for Python struck me as a particularly elegant solution for generating simple XML documents without having to worry about encoding issues, missing tags and so forth—so I re-implemented it in PHP:

XmlWriter.class.php

Example code:

$array = array(
    array('monkey', 'banana', 'Jim'),
    array('hamster', 'apples', 'Kola'),
    array('turtle', 'beans', 'Berty'),
);
$xml = new XmlWriter();
$xml->push('zoo');
foreach ($array as $animal) {
    $xml->push('animal', array('species' => $animal[0]));
    $xml->element('name', $animal[2]);
    $xml->element('food', $animal[1]);
    $xml->pop();
}
$xml->pop();
print $xml->getXml();

Which produces this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<zoo>
  <animal species="monkey">
    <name>Jim</name>
    <food>banana</food>
  </animal>
  <animal species="hamster">
    <name>Kola</name>
    <food>apples</food>
  </animal>
  <animal species="turtle">
    <name>Berty</name>
    <food>beans</food>
  </animal>
</zoo>

Posted 29th April 2003 at 11:44 pm

20 comments

The approach I use for my "XML serializer" built into my XML-RPC library is just to take an ordinary PHP data structure and serialize it into XML. No object syntax necessary :) For attributes, you just have a key be something like $foo['tag attr']. Since you can't have a space in an XML tag, there's no problem. It's all of about 40 lines.
Keith - 30th April 2003 03:20 - #
Thanks Simon! This'll be useful.
Bill Humphries - 30th April 2003 07:01 - #
I've modified it slightly for support of <![CDATA[ ]]> tags thus:
$this->xml .= '>'.htmlentities($content);.'</'.$element.'>'."\n" ;

Becomes:

if (!preg_match("/\<\!\[CDATA\[(.*)\]\]\>/", $content)){ $content = htmlentities($content); } $this->xml .= '>'.$content.'</'.$element.'>'."\n";

And could we please have <br> tags? Code's complicated otherwise :-)

Aquarion - 3rd May 2003 15:19 - #
nice work - this is going to make my new task of writing a flash/php/mysql interactive extravaganza far easier :D

Thanks

beardman - 23rd July 2003 17:49 - #
wwwwdsds
www - 27th November 2003 11:42 - #
Thanks for your useful code.

I suggest replacing the htmlentities($value) calls with a call to a member function that replaces only &, < and > in body xml and ' and " in attributes as well as also calling the library function utf8_encode($value) to put the text in true utf-8

XML does not know about the other html entities unless they are defined in a dtd or somesuch

Matthew Carey - 7th March 2004 15:48 - #
how deal with charset gb2312?
ahu - 27th October 2004 16:59 - #
I added an 'array2xml' method to make it easy to automatically convert existing PHP arrays into XML structures. // array2xml method - a simple example $xml = new XmlWriter(); $array = array("stocks"=>array("symbols"=>array("MSFT","GOO G","YHOO"))); $xml->array2xml($array); print $xml->getXml(); // array2xml method - a more complex example (adding attributes) $xml = new XmlWriter(); $array = array("stocks"=>array("symbols"=>array("MSFT","GOO G",array("YHOO",array("company"=>"Yahoo!","close"= >35))))); $xml->array2xml($array); print $xml->getXml();
Justin - 8th July 2005 11:30 - #
sdsdg
Dinesh - 21st July 2005 12:15 - #
safd
dfasf - 21st July 2005 12:16 - #
Hi
Dinesh Kumar - 21st July 2005 12:17 - #
disubfidsbfuisdiufsd
Test - 6th January 2006 14:05 - #
The XmlWriter class works so well but i can not parse the returned xml data using javascript! Please help
Johnson - 14th February 2006 07:37 - #
Very neat code... Thanks for your help.
f1sher - 21st April 2006 15:44 - #
Thanks... it's a good approach when DOMDocument failes .. because the guy that admin's my site .. hasn't got the latest version of php ... :D
Lazar Mihai - 26th May 2006 14:23 - #
xcvxcv
xcvxc - 23rd June 2006 16:38 - #
Great, now I dont have to bother with xmldom in creation. Great!
Henrik - 19th August 2006 15:09 - #
if you want to see the code written with the class in ffox you'll need to add the following line: header('Content-Type: text/xml'); when showing the xml
xerch - 29th August 2006 15:53 - #
Seems the XmlWriter.class.php don't work under PHP 5.1. Error returned was :-
Fatal error: Cannot redeclare class xmlwriter in /var/www/web4/cgi-bin/includes/XmlWriter.class.inc on line 6
Anyone have any idea how to overcome this beside downgrading to PHP 5.0
Allie Syadiqin - 8th September 2006 15:10 - #
I had the same error as Allie, fixed it by renaming the XmlWriter class to something else.
Seb - 8th October 2006 17:23 - #

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XmlWriter: Generating XML from PHP

20 comments