IMDB Details Grabber: Using PHP DOM XPath to extract Movie details
Recently, a friend of mine asked me if there's an IMDB Parser that allows to fetch information about any Movie on IMDB. Unfortunately, IMDB does not offer an API, so , after doing a bit googling I found a couple of nice IMDB Grabbers (PHP IMDB Grabber, PHP Classes IMDB), despite both being very good ones, I decided develop my own class. It will rely on XPath, and it would also allow developers to extract additional information easily without writing much more code.
PHP DomXPath: Read Complex XML files easily.
XPath allows traversing through XML elements and attributes very easily. For complex XMLs, using XPath can significantly reduce the complexity of coding.
Good Tutorial of XPath can be viewed on W3C schools here. Reference on DomXPath can be viewed here.
XPath is useful if someone needs to extract a specific node from an entire XML, rather than parsing the entire XML by running a query. Below I will explain how to use DomDocument and DomXPath to read XML. At first I will start with a simple XML, and then more complex.
PHP 5 XMLReader: Reading XML with Namespace (Part 2)
This is a continuation of previous article, where I wrote on how to use PHP'5 DOM to read XML Files easily. But, for large files, its better to use XMLReader. Unlike DomDocument, XMLReader does not load the entire File on memory. It reads an XML file one node at a time. I hardly use XMLReader because it requires writing a lot of codes, but for extremely large XML Files, its better to use it. Full reference on XMLReader can be viewed here. It requires PHP 5.2.
PHP 5 DOM and XMLReader: Reading XML with Namespace (Part 1)
PHP-5's DOM and XMLReader provides the ability to read XML files easily. The good thing about PHP-5's DOM (mainly DomDocument, DomNodeList, DomNode) is that it implements the standard DOM features as specified by W3C. W3C's reference on DOM can be viewed here. So, if someone has used DOM before (say on JavaScript), then it would be easy for him/her to grasp PHP-5's DOM.
PHP-5 DomDocument: Creating a Basic XML
Since I wrote my ZCE Exam in last Sept 08', I have been using DomDocument mainly to generate XML files. Its a powerful library of PHP-5, one thing I find surprising is the lack of tutorials on the web on PHP-5's DomDocument. So, I decided to write a simple tutorial on how to use DomDocument to write XML. In this article, I will try to explain the basics of DomDocument and then will create a couple of simple XML files.
