Store XML data using Transient API WordPress

Bob comments:

Hi this is actually what I wanted to do, so thanks. Denzel Chia's solution worked all I had to do is throw it in an array but your plugin has some neat parameters.

When I tried using it though I get parse errors, I suspect this is due to a simplexml hiccup when lokking at this XML format.

The XML format is pretty much exactly like the api.wordpress.com one, for instance api.wordpress.org/plugins/info/1.0/video-sidebar-widgets.xml (just random one).

The parse error I get is

function.simplexml-load-string]: Entity: line 8: parser error : AttValue: " or ' expected

I thought maybe adding stripslashes to load would help, for instance
return $xml ? @simplexml_load_string(stripslashes($xml)) : false;

But that did nothing, I'm sure it something very simple I am overlooking.

Scott comments:

Bob, I tried with the URL you provided and it seemed to work OK for me. Can you provide another sample XML URL to try? An easy way to test the code is to create a test file in the root of your wordpress directory (test.php or something) and load it on your website. Here is the contents of a test.php file that works for me. It uses the same functions as above, but just stripped down to the basics. If it works, it should just show the name of the plugin on the page and nothing else.


<?php
// put this all inside a test.php file at the root of
// your wordpress directory and then load http://[yourwebsite.com]/test.php

require_once( dirname(__FILE__) . '/wp-load.php' );
wp();

// return response body from a url as a string
function stereo_get_feed($url)
{
$data = false;

if ($url) {
$response = wp_remote_get($url, array('timeout' => 15));

if (!is_wp_error($response)) {
$data = wp_remote_retrieve_body($response);
}
}

return $data ? $data : false;
}

// check for cached text from a url, otherwise fetch it
// then convert it to an xml object
function stereo_get_xml_object($url)
{
$key = md5($url);
if (false == ($xml = get_transient('xml_'.$key))) {
$xml = stereo_get_feed($url);
if ($xml) {
set_transient('xml_'.$key, $xml, 60*60*8); // 8 hours
}
}

return $xml ? @simplexml_load_string($xml) : false;
}


$xml = stereo_get_xml_object('http://api.wordpress.org/plugins/info/1.0/video-sidebar-widgets.xml');
if ($xml) {
$name = $xml->name;
echo $name;
}

?>


Bob comments:

Hmm, odd using this stripped down code works perfectly, I tested it on several XML urls. So far so good, I see it in the db as well.


Thanks Scott!

Scott comments:

I'm not sure if this is it, but I noticed we had the line:

$xml = stereo_get_xml_object("http://example.com/ $plugin_uri.xml");

(Notice that space in the address... make sure that is gone!)

Bob comments:

Ya might have been because looking back I'm not sure why, since it is now working.

Let me throw in the original output and parsing to see if anything gets borked, and if it's all good I will close this.