Displaying XML dynamically using PHP and URL variables

Question

I'm a game writer and designer and we use XML files for our dialogue engine. I'm trying to display the dialogue on a website for my team to see, and I'd like to be able to dynamically display certain parts or 'chapters' of the XML based on a URL variable. I'm using PHP for this.

Here is a very simple example of how our XML is structured:

<dialogues>
    <dialogue id="0">
        <line id="0_1" name="John">Line 1</line>
        <line id="0_2" name="Eric">Line 2</line>
        <line id="0_3" name="Ben">Line 3</line>
    </dialogue>
    <dialogue id="1">
        <line id="1_1" name="Sarah">Line 1</line>
        <line id="1_2" name="Jessica">Line 2</line>
        <line id="1_3" name="Kelly">Line 3</line>
    </dialogue>
</dialogues>

What I'd like to do is display the lines of specific dialogue blocks based on a variable I pass through the URL. Here is my PHP so far.

$url = "dialogues.xml";
$xml = simplexml_load_file($url);

$chapter = $_GET['c'];

    foreach($xml->dialogue->line as $dialogue)
    {
        echo '<p class="id">id: ' . $dialogue["id"] . '</p>';
        echo '<p class="name">' . $dialogue["name"] . '</p>';
        echo $dialogue."<br/>";
    }

So you can see that I've got a $chapter variable that I would get with ?c= in the URL, I just don't know what to do from there. What I would do to this code to only display, say, the lines within <dialogue id="1"> based on ?c=1 in the URL?

nomistic · Accepted Answer · 2015-04-19 18:37:08Z

2

Try using xpath; it's designed for this sort of situation. Here's an example of how to get each line of dialogue.

foreach ($xml->xpath("//dialogue[@*])/line") as $line)
     echo $line;

Here's a helpful reference sourcce https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/XPath

answered Apr 19, 2015 at 18:37

nomistic

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1 Comment

nomistic Over a year ago

has happened to me in the past. :) XML? first thought: xpath :) It also works on well formed html. If this solved your problem, please mark it so. :)

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