php syntax to display xml in wordpress

Question

I'm trying to display information from an xml file. It doesn't gives me error, but the array is empty. I am using wordrpess and I have not much experience with php, so, i don't know if this is the best way to do.

This is my code:

<?php 
function pubmedQuery() { 
    $xml = 'http://eutils.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/eutils/esearch.fcgi?db=pubmed&term=science[journal]+AND+breast+cancer+AND+2008[pdat]';
    $xml_file =  simplexml_load_file( $xml );
    $results_count = $xml_file->Count;
    $results_ids = array(); 
    foreach ( $xml_file->IdList->Id as $items ) {
        $results_ids[] = $items;
    }
    return "Hay " . $results_count . " resultados: " . $results_ids;
}
//Show results
    echo'<h3>Resultados de búsqueda:</h3>' . pubmedQuery ();    
?>

And this is the result:

Resultados de búsqueda: Hay 0 resultados: Array

thanks! and excuse my english!

The XML returned actually doesn't contain any results, however when browsing to the xml url, it does. I suspect the server hosting the content is detecting scraping and preventing it? — Gavin
– Gavin, Commented Nov 11, 2013 at 10:15

davidkonrad · Accepted Answer · 2013-11-11 10:43:50Z

1

@Gavin is right. However, you can get the content by file_get_contents :

function pubmedQuery() { 
    $xml = 'http://eutils.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/eutils/esearch.fcgi?db=pubmed&term=science[journal]+AND+breast+cancer+AND+2008[pdat]';
    $content =  file_get_contents($xml);
    $xml_file = simplexml_load_string($content);
    $results_count = $xml_file->Count;
    $results_ids = array(); 
    foreach ( $xml_file->IdList->Id as $items ) {
        $results_ids[] = $items;
    }
    return "Hay " . $results_count . " resultados: " . implode("\n",$results_ids);
}
//Show results
echo'<h3>Resultados de búsqueda:</h3>' . pubmedQuery ();

Outputs

Hay 6 resultados: 19008416 18927361 18787170 18487186 18239126 18239125

Notice implode("\n",$results_ids) which returns a string with the found id's, instead of returning the text array, regardless if there is found id's or not.

edited Nov 11, 2013 at 10:43

answered Nov 11, 2013 at 10:28

davidkonrad

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Comments

Gavin · Accepted Answer · 2013-11-11 10:24:01Z

0

As per my comment, the website you are scraping from appears to have user-agent detection.

function pubmedQuery() { 
    $context = stream_context_create(array(
      'http'=>array(
        'user_agent' => 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1) AppleWebKit/536.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/20.0.1132.57 Safari/536.11'
       )
    ));

    $xml = file_get_contents('http://eutils.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/eutils/esearch.fcgi?db=pubmed&term=science[journal]+AND+breast+cancer+AND+2008[pdat]', FALSE, $context);

    $xml_file = simplexml_load_string($xml);
    $results_count = $xml_file->Count;
    $results_ids = array(); 
    foreach ( $xml_file->IdList->Id as $items ) {
        $results_ids[] = $items;
    }
    return "Hay " . $results_count . " resultados: " . $results_ids;
}
//Show results
echo'<h3>Resultados de búsqueda:</h3>' . pubmedQuery ();

The above code will spoof the user-agent for the file_get_contents call so the website will think it's a normal browser.

answered Nov 11, 2013 at 10:24

Gavin

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2 Comments

ThemesCreator Over a year ago

Thanks! both answer are good. But i don`t unsderstand user-agent detection problem. I will have to read about it.

Gavin Over a year ago

It's quite possible that the server requires a user-agent to correctly work, however it may also be possible that they purposely prevented you from seeing results unless your what it thinks is a valid browser. In most cases, file_get_contents, simplexml_load_file etc all send a HTTP request without a user-agent, so spoofing one will tell the server you are using, for example, chrome, or firefox. HTH.

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