trouble parsing xml and converting it to json with php for use with $.ajax

Question

I'm attempting to use php to grab xml from an API. So far I've looked at the following blog post and this previous stackoverflow post but am not having success.

The xml data is available here by viewing the source of the web page.

From my understanding php's json_encode returns the json data as string prepended by string(length).

What I'd like to do is to load the encoded json data with JQuery's $.ajax to manipulate the data with javascript. However the data returned from php's json_encode is not compatible with $.ajax.

Would anyone have any suggestions on how to format the string so that the data can be read by ajax?

update, my code php code is here:

<?php        

    $url = file_get_contents("http://api.wefeelfine.org:8080/ShowFeelings?display=xml&returnfields=sentence&limit=50");

    $simpleXml = simplexml_load_string($url);

    $json = json_encode($simpleXml);

    var_dump($json);

?>

I'm using php to do a cross-domain request, then using the url for the php code with $.ajax. When using $.ajax to access the API's url without php I get a No 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' error.

are you parsing your ajax response text through JSON.parse()? — Félix Adriyel Gagnon-Grenier, Dec 09 '13 at 18:02
that xml is fairly simple to parse using ajax also if you are having problems converting it to json. Need to show your php code — charlietfl, Dec 09 '13 at 18:06
json_encode shouldn't prepend 'string(length)', or anything not in the origin object. If I were to guess that's just the output of a var_dump or print_r describing the result of a json_encode operation. — stakolee, Dec 09 '13 at 20:19

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 09 '13 at 22:33

0

json_encode won't work on a SimpleXMLElement object, at least not as you would expect it. Try preprocessing your XML like so:

$feelings = array();
foreach($simpleXml as $feeling) {
    $feelings[] = array('sentence' => $feeling['sentence'] . '');
}
$json = json_encode($feelings);

answered Dec 09 '13 at 22:33

Samuel

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thanks Samy. Looks like that works! Though I realized that the data I'd like contains multiple tags where as the url above only has a single tag (sentence). Is there a way I could return multiple tags? For example in [this url](http://api.wefeelfine.org:8080/ShowFeelings?display=xml&returnfields=imageid,feeling,sentence,posttime,postdate,posturl,gender,born,country,state,city,lat,lon,conditions&limit=500) – clhenrick Dec 11 '13 at 01:21

trouble parsing xml and converting it to json with php for use with $.ajax

1 Answers1