Problems with strings containing <?

[jdh]

Hey all,

 

I have encountered something strange in a script.  I am trying to write an XML header and then fill in the file:

$xmlFile = "fetchableData.xml";
$fh = fopen($xmlFile, 'r+');

$housingData = updateHousingAndReturnXML();
$xmlData = '<?xml version="1.0" ?>'.$housingData;

// echo $xmlData;

fwrite($fh,$xmlData);
fclose($fh);

 

This code fills the file with the contents of $housingData, but <?xml version="1.0" ?> is not added.  If I break up <? it will add it but then I get errors when parsing the XML. 

 

Echoing the string also doesn't work with <?. 

 

I guess what is happening is that the string is getting parsed by the PHP engine for some reason.  Escaping <? doesn't work.

 

I am assuming I am missing something basic.  But the manual doesn't say anything about <? being parsed in strings.

 

Help?

 

Thanks!

 

[rajivgonsalves]

does the string show up properly when you echo it ? what does updateHousingAndReturnXML do ? the only thing I can see that might go wrong is your using the same file handle for reading and writing so your reading and writing should be pretty accurate.

[jdh]

echo '<?xml version="1.0" ?> returns nothing.

 

updateHousingAndReturnXML() opens a webpage (using cURL), parses is with PCRE, and then returns a section of XML as a string.  The XML returned by the function is stripped (doesn't give the information tags) so I am trying to add them by adding <xml version="1.0" ?> to the string before writing it to the file.

[ignace]

Do you mean that it doesn't show up in view source or on-screen?

[Buddski]

I would use something like this, its clean and simple.

http://php.net/manual/en/class.domdocument.php

[jdh]

echo '<?xml version="1.0" ?>' doesn't appear in the source (nor in rendered page).

 

I DOMDocument builds XML files from a tree that you have already stored into a bunch of the DOM objects.  It is a way to do it, but would involve rewriting a lot of functions like updateHousingAndReturnXML() that build xml sections as strings.

[ignace]

Add this to your PHP script (very first line):

 

ini_set('short_open_tag', false);

[jdh]

@ignace: No love.  echo '<?xml version="1.0" ?>' does nothing with short_open_tag turned off (and ini_get() confirms it was set properly).

[Daniel0]

If echo doesn't work it's probably because a fatal error is occurring before it. Check your error log or enable display_errors.

[oni-kun]

Yeah, it should not parse as anything different. It works on my WAMP/online server echoing that string, but I have seen other people report this problem before.. Therefor I can conclude it's a server configuration issue of some sort.

[jdh]

Thanks!

 

In the config (via phpinfo) the only non-default option I found was safe_mode which was set to 1.