CII. XML parser functions

Introduction

Installation

This extension uses expat, which can be found at http://www.jclark.com/xml/. The Makefile that comes with expat does not build a library by default, you can use this make rule for that:
libexpat.a: $(OBJS)
    ar -rc $@ $(OBJS)
    ranlib $@
A source RPM package of expat can be found at http://sourceforge.net/projects/expat/.

Note that if you are using Apache-1.3.7 or later, you already have the required expat library. Simply configure PHP using --with-xml (without any additional path) and it will automatically use the expat library built into Apache.

On UNIX, run configure with the --with-xml option. The expat library should be installed somewhere your compiler can find it. If you compile PHP as a module for Apache 1.3.9 or later, PHP will automatically use the bundled expat library from Apache. You may need to set CPPFLAGS and LDFLAGS in your environment before running configure if you have installed expat somewhere exotic.

Build PHP. Tada! That should be it.

About This Extension

This PHP extension implements support for James Clark's expat in PHP. This toolkit lets you parse, but not validate, XML documents. It supports three source character encodings also provided by PHP: US-ASCII, ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8. UTF-16 is not supported.

This extension lets you create XML parsers and then define handlers for different XML events. Each XML parser also has a few parameters you can adjust.

The XML event handlers defined are:

Error Codes

The following constants are defined for XML error codes (as returned by xml_parse()):

XML_ERROR_NONE
XML_ERROR_NO_MEMORY
XML_ERROR_SYNTAX
XML_ERROR_NO_ELEMENTS
XML_ERROR_INVALID_TOKEN
XML_ERROR_UNCLOSED_TOKEN
XML_ERROR_PARTIAL_CHAR
XML_ERROR_TAG_MISMATCH
XML_ERROR_DUPLICATE_ATTRIBUTE
XML_ERROR_JUNK_AFTER_DOC_ELEMENT
XML_ERROR_PARAM_ENTITY_REF
XML_ERROR_UNDEFINED_ENTITY
XML_ERROR_RECURSIVE_ENTITY_REF
XML_ERROR_ASYNC_ENTITY
XML_ERROR_BAD_CHAR_REF
XML_ERROR_BINARY_ENTITY_REF
XML_ERROR_ATTRIBUTE_EXTERNAL_ENTITY_REF
XML_ERROR_MISPLACED_XML_PI
XML_ERROR_UNKNOWN_ENCODING
XML_ERROR_INCORRECT_ENCODING
XML_ERROR_UNCLOSED_CDATA_SECTION
XML_ERROR_EXTERNAL_ENTITY_HANDLING

Character Encoding

PHP's XML extension supports the Unicode character set through different character encodings. There are two types of character encodings, source encoding and target encoding. PHP's internal representation of the document is always encoded with UTF-8.

Source encoding is done when an XML document is parsed. Upon creating an XML parser, a source encoding can be specified (this encoding can not be changed later in the XML parser's lifetime). The supported source encodings are ISO-8859-1, US-ASCII and UTF-8. The former two are single-byte encodings, which means that each character is represented by a single byte. UTF-8 can encode characters composed by a variable number of bits (up to 21) in one to four bytes. The default source encoding used by PHP is ISO-8859-1.

Target encoding is done when PHP passes data to XML handler functions. When an XML parser is created, the target encoding is set to the same as the source encoding, but this may be changed at any point. The target encoding will affect character data as well as tag names and processing instruction targets.

If the XML parser encounters characters outside the range that its source encoding is capable of representing, it will return an error.

If PHP encounters characters in the parsed XML document that can not be represented in the chosen target encoding, the problem characters will be "demoted". Currently, this means that such characters are replaced by a question mark.

Some Examples

Here are some example PHP scripts parsing XML documents.

XML External Entity Example

This example highlights XML code. It illustrates how to use an external entity reference handler to include and parse other documents, as well as how PIs can be processed, and a way of determining "trust" for PIs containing code.

XML documents that can be used for this example are found below the example (xmltest.xml and xmltest2.xml.)

Example 3. External Entity Example

$file = "xmltest.xml";

function trustedFile($file) {
    // only trust local files owned by ourselves
    if (!eregi("^([a-z]+)://", $file) 
        && fileowner($file) == getmyuid()) {
            return true;
    }
    return false;
}

function startElement($parser, $name, $attribs) {
    print "&lt;<font color=\"#0000cc\">$name</font>";
    if (sizeof($attribs)) {
        while (list($k, $v) = each($attribs)) {
            print " <font color=\"#009900\">$k</font>=\"<font 
                   color=\"#990000\">$v</font>\"";
        }
    }
    print "&gt;";
}

function endElement($parser, $name) {
    print "&lt;/<font color=\"#0000cc\">$name</font>&gt;";
}

function characterData($parser, $data) {
    print "<b>$data</b>";
}

function PIHandler($parser, $target, $data) {
    switch (strtolower($target)) {
        case "php":
            global $parser_file;
            // If the parsed document is "trusted", we say it is safe
            // to execute PHP code inside it.  If not, display the code
            // instead.
            if (trustedFile($parser_file[$parser])) {
                eval($data);
            } else {
                printf("Untrusted PHP code: <i>%s</i>", 
                        htmlspecialchars($data));
            }
            break;
    }
}

function defaultHandler($parser, $data) {
    if (substr($data, 0, 1) == "&" && substr($data, -1, 1) == ";") {
        printf('<font color="#aa00aa">%s</font>', 
                htmlspecialchars($data));
    } else {
        printf('<font size="-1">%s</font>', 
                htmlspecialchars($data));
    }
}

function externalEntityRefHandler($parser, $openEntityNames, $base, $systemId,
                                  $publicId) {
    if ($systemId) {
        if (!list($parser, $fp) = new_xml_parser($systemId)) {
            printf("Could not open entity %s at %s\n", $openEntityNames,
                   $systemId);
            return false;
        }
        while ($data = fread($fp, 4096)) {
            if (!xml_parse($parser, $data, feof($fp))) {
                printf("XML error: %s at line %d while parsing entity %s\n",
                       xml_error_string(xml_get_error_code($parser)),
                       xml_get_current_line_number($parser), $openEntityNames);
                xml_parser_free($parser);
                return false;
            }
        }
        xml_parser_free($parser);
        return true;
    }
    return false;
}


function new_xml_parser($file) {
    global $parser_file;

    $xml_parser = xml_parser_create();
    xml_parser_set_option($xml_parser, XML_OPTION_CASE_FOLDING, 1);
    xml_set_element_handler($xml_parser, "startElement", "endElement");
    xml_set_character_data_handler($xml_parser, "characterData");
    xml_set_processing_instruction_handler($xml_parser, "PIHandler");
    xml_set_default_handler($xml_parser, "defaultHandler");
    xml_set_external_entity_ref_handler($xml_parser, "externalEntityRefHandler");
    
    if (!($fp = @fopen($file, "r"))) {
        return false;
    }
    if (!is_array($parser_file)) {
        settype($parser_file, "array");
    }
    $parser_file[$xml_parser] = $file;
    return array($xml_parser, $fp);
}

if (!(list($xml_parser, $fp) = new_xml_parser($file))) {
    die("could not open XML input");
}

print "<pre>";
while ($data = fread($fp, 4096)) {
    if (!xml_parse($xml_parser, $data, feof($fp))) {
        die(sprintf("XML error: %s at line %d\n",
                    xml_error_string(xml_get_error_code($xml_parser)),
                    xml_get_current_line_number($xml_parser)));
    }
}
print "</pre>";
print "parse complete\n";
xml_parser_free($xml_parser);

?>

This file is included from xmltest.xml:

Table of Contents
xml_parser_create -- create an XML parser
xml_set_object -- Use XML Parser within an object
xml_set_element_handler -- set up start and end element handlers
xml_set_character_data_handler -- set up character data handler
xml_set_processing_instruction_handler --  Set up processing instruction (PI) handler
xml_set_default_handler -- set up default handler
xml_set_unparsed_entity_decl_handler --  Set up unparsed entity declaration handler
xml_set_notation_decl_handler -- set up notation declaration handler
xml_set_external_entity_ref_handler -- set up external entity reference handler
xml_parse -- start parsing an XML document
xml_get_error_code -- get XML parser error code
xml_error_string -- get XML parser error string
xml_get_current_line_number -- get current line number for an XML parser
xml_get_current_column_number --  Get current column number for an XML parser
xml_get_current_byte_index -- get current byte index for an XML parser
xml_parse_into_struct -- Parse XML data into an array structure
xml_parser_free -- Free an XML parser
xml_parser_set_option -- set options in an XML parser
xml_parser_get_option -- get options from an XML parser
utf8_decode --  Converts a string with ISO-8859-1 characters encoded with UTF-8 to single-byte ISO-8859-1.
utf8_encode -- encodes an ISO-8859-1 string to UTF-8
xml_parser_create_ns --  Create an XML parser
xml_set_end_namespace_decl_handler --  Set up character data handler
xml_set_start_namespace_decl_handler --  Set up character data handler