Pulling data in an array

[JohnSaunders]

Can somebody tell me how to go about pulling the song name, artist, and album name from a file that contains 10 of each? I've tried doing it myself using foreach, but I couldn't get it to work. The code below will create one line, but I would like it to create multiple lines of each song, artist, and album.

$file = "../data.xml";
$xml_parser = xml_parser_create();
 
if (($fp = fopen($file, "r"))) {
$data = fread($fp, filesize($file));
fclose($fp);
 
xml_parse_into_struct($xml_parser, $data, $vals, $index);
xml_parser_free($xml_parser);
 
$title = $vals[2]["value"];
$artist = $vals[5]["value"];
$album = $vals[8]["value"];
 
/* here's what i tried but couldn't get it to work. I know the array values are wrong, but I'm not sure how to do it the right way.
$arr = array("$vals[2]","$vals[5]","$vals[8]");
reset ($arr);
while (list(, $value) = each ($arr)) {
    echo "<li>$value</li>";
}
foreach ($arr as $value) {
    echo "<li>$value</li>";
}
*/
 
echo "<li>$title by $artist from $album</li>";
} 

Here's an example of the code in the XML file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1" ?>
<now_playing playing="1">
<song order="1">
	 <title>Loco</title>
	 <artist>311</artist>
	 <album>311</album>
</song>
<song order="2">
	 <title>Purpose</title>
	 <artist>311</artist>
	 <album>311</album>
</song>
<song order="3">
	 <title>Misdirected Hostility</title>
	 <artist>311</artist>
	 <album>311</album>
</song>
<song order="4">
	 <title>Don't Let Me Down</title>
	 <artist>311</artist>
	 <album>311</album>
</song>
<song order="5">
	 <title>Sweet</title>
	 <artist>311</artist>
	 <album>311</album>
</song>
</now_playing>

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[mattjacob]

This is kind of messy, but it should work:

$file = "data.xml";

$xml_parser = xml_parser_create();



if (false != ($data = file_get_contents($file)))

{

    xml_parse_into_struct($xml_parser, $data, $vals, $index);

    xml_parser_free($xml_parser);



    $filter = array();



    // Process data



    foreach ($index as $key => $val)

    {

        if ('TITLE' == $key || 'ARTIST' == $key || 'ALBUM' == $key)

        {

            foreach ($val as $key1 => $val1)

            {

                $filter[$key1][$key] = $vals[$val1]['value'];

            }

        }

    }



    // Output data



    echo '<ul>';



    foreach ($filter as $f)

    {

        echo "<li>{$f['TITLE']} by {$f['ARTIST']} from {$f['ALBUM']}</li>";

    }



    echo '</ul>';

} 

[JohnSaunders]

Thanks!

[mattjacob]

I should mention that you need to be using PHP >= 4.3.0 in order for file_get_contents() to work.

[JohnSaunders]

mattjacob,

I was able to get it to work. Could you tell me how to make it so I can specify the number of songs to be listed? For example, if the file contains 100 songs, I'd just like to be able to show 10 of them.

[mattjacob]

In the output section, use a for loop instead of a foreach loop. In fact, it would look something like this:

for ($i = 0; $i < 10; $i++)

{

    echo "<li>{$filter[$i]['TITLE']} by {$filter[$i]['ARTIST']} from {$filter[$i]['ALBUM']}</li>";

} 

Just make sure you actually have at least 10 entries, otherwise you'll get undefined offset notices all over the place.

[JohnSaunders]

Thanks again!

[Zoef]

You could also break out of the foreach loop:

$max = 10;

$i = 0;

foreach ($filter as $f)

{

    echo "<li>{$f['TITLE']} by {$f['ARTIST']} from {$f['ALBUM']}</li>";

    $i++;

    if ($i >= $max) break;

} 

That should not give you any notices, even if the number of songs is less then 10.

Rik

[JohnSaunders]

In addition to selecting 10 songs from the file, I would also like to alternate the row colors of the table. I found a script that will do this using MySQL, but I'm just not sure how to convert it to work with the script I'm using. If somebody could tell me how to do this I would appreciate it.

$color1 = "#CCFFCC"; 
$color2 = "#BFD8BC"; 
$row_count = 0; 
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($sql_events)) { 
    $event_date = $row["event_date"]; 
    $event_title = $row["event_title"]; 

    /* Now we do this small line which is basically going to tell 
    PHP to alternate the colors between the two colors we defined above. */ 

    $row_color = ($row_count % 2) ? $color1 : $color2; 

    // Echo your table row and table data that you want to be looped over and over here. 

    echo "<tr> 
    <td width="110" bgcolor="$row_color" nowrap> 
    $article_date</td> 
    <td bgcolor="$row_color"> 
    <a href="articles.php?cmd=full_article&article_id=$article_id">$article_title</a></td> 
    </tr>"; 

    // Add 1 to the row count 

    $row_count++; 
} 

[JohnSaunders]

I figured out how to alternate the table rows, however whenever a value contains an ampersand "&" it cuts off the text in the remaining fields. Does anybody know how to make it so the & wont' screw up the values?

[Zoef]

That's probably because the content hasn't been encoded properly. Try with &

Rik

[JohnSaunders]

I'm not really sure how to go about doing this. I tried this method but the problem is still occuring so I must not be doing something correctly.

for ($i = 0; $i < 10; $i++) { 
 $song = "{$filter[$i]['TITLE']}";
 $song = preg_replace ("'\&'", "&amp;", $song);
 echo "<li>$song by {$filter[$i]['ARTIST']} from {$filter[$i]['ALBUM']}</li>"; 
} 

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[mattjacob]

You could try something like this:

for ($i = 0; $i < 10; $i++)

{

    echo htmlspecialchars("<li>{$filter[$i]['TITLE']} by {$filter[$i]['ARTIST']} from {$filter[$i]['ALBUM']}</li>");

} 

[JohnSaunders]

mattjacob,

Thanks for your help (again). I tried it out and it's converting the <li></li> tags so they show up in the web page. Could you tell me how to make it so it won't convert the tags?

[mattjacob]

Oops--I'm still waking up over here.

for ($i = 0; $i < 10; $i++)

{

    echo '<li>';

    echo htmlspecialchars("{$filter[$i]['TITLE']} by {$filter[$i]['ARTIST']} from {$filter[$i]['ALBUM']}");

    echo '</li>';

} 

[JohnSaunders]

Unfortunately, it's still cutting everything off whenever there's an &. Other things like $, -, ', etc. do not cause a problem.

Here's an example of what's going on:

xml file:

<title>Coffee & TV</title>
<artist>Blur</artist>
<album>Blur</artist>

Here's what it looks like on the webpage:

Coffee - nothing - nothing

Any ideas?

[mattjacob]

I haven't done too much work with XML in PHP, but my guess is that the XML parser is eating the &. Try changing the & in the file to &amp; and see if that helps.

[JohnSaunders]

mattjacob,

Unfortunately, the & is coming off of a CD so I can't change it to &amp;.

According to this http://us4.php.net/manual/en/functio...ta-handler.php, this guy (about half way down) says that you need to rewrite every ampersand as &amp; in the input stream. How do I do that? I've tried the following and have moved the str_replace before the xml_parse_into_struct but I get an error each time:

$xml_parser = xml_parser_create();
 
if (false != ($data = file_get_contents($file))) {
    xml_parse_into_struct($xml_parser, $data, $vals, $index);
    $xml_parser = str_replace ("&", "&", $xml_parser);
    xml_parser_free($xml_parser); 

produces this:

Warning: xml_parser_free(): supplied argument is not a valid XML Parser resource

Do you or anybody else have any idea how to do this on the input stream?

[JohnSaunders]

Holy $%^# I figured it out! It needed this:

    $data= str_replace ("&", "&", $data);