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Differences with PHP5 and PHP4 and manipulating content of XML DOM

Posted by: Asif D. Khalyani

I just recently created a solution in php to access an XML output from a .XLS (MS Excel 2003) spreadsheet.

The problem I found was:

==> I was working locally with PHP5. And when I finished all my hard work, I uploaded the files to the webserver to find nothing but errors.

Errors were along the lines of

"Warning: domdocument::domdocument() expects at least 1 parameter, 0 given "

"Call to undefined function load()"

I soon found the cause to be the versions of PHP that we were using differed.

So heres my findings:

	PHP4	PHP5
The differences	in php4 you need to work directly with the arrays. SEE Spec http://za.php.net/manual/en/ref.domxml.php	In php5 you have a set of already defined functions for accessing the XML tags and values. SEE: http://nz.php.net/manual/en/ref.dom.php
Reading from a file	`$dom = domxml_open_file("test.xml");`	`$doc = new DOMDocument(); $doc->load(' test.xml' );`
return DOMNodeList of all elements under the root node	`$tagnamenodes = $dom->get_elements_by_tagname( "tagname" );`	`$tagnamenodes = $doc->getElementsByTagName( "tagname" );`
get the elements named element_name	`$nodes = $othertagnamenodes[0]->get_elements_by_tagname( "othertagnames" );`	`$nodes = $othertagnamenodes->item(0)->getElementsByTagName( "othertagnames" );`
Getting the values of a tag given an array retrieved by getelementsbytagname functions.	`$data = $datalist[6]->get_content();`	`$data = $datalist->item(6)->nodeValue;`