Displaying XML with PHP 4

[MrSpeed]

I realize this is another question that has a simple answer.

I am using nusoap to retrieve data from an web service. I want to simple display the result in an html table that is at most 15 items 3x5cells.

The xml is failry straight forward

<person> 
 <Name>Name 1</Name> 
 <age>32</age> 
 <phone>blah blah</phone> 
 <etc>blah blah</etc> 
</person>  
<person> 
 <Name>Name 2</Name> 
 <age>24</age> 
 <phone>blah blah</phone> 
 <etc>blah blah</etc> 
</person>  

I looked the archives here and for some scripts at hotscripts and I didn't see anything very simple. I have PHP4 so I can't take advantage of Simple XML extension or easily use xslt.

Can anyone point me in a diredtion/tutorial to get this type of task easily done? I'm a hack when it comes to php.

Thanks,

[vincevincevince]

$text="<person> 
 <Name>Name 1</Name> 
 <age>32</age> 
 <phone>blah blah</phone> 
 <etc>blah blah</etc> 
</person>";
 
$a=0;
while($row=parse_tag("person",$text))
{
$a++;
$data[$a][Name]=parse_tag("Name",$row);
$data[$a][age]=parse_tag("age",$row);
//... etc ...
$text=substr($text,strpos($text,$row),strlen($row));
}
 
print "<table>";
for ($a=0;$a<sizeof($data);$a++)
{
print "<tr><td>".$data[$a][Name]."</td>";
print "<td>".$data[$a][age]."</td>";
print "<td>".$data[$a][phone]."</td></tr>";
//... etc ...
}
print "</table>";
 
function parse_tag($tag,$text)
{
//make it preg-safe
$tag=preg_replace("/[^0-9a-z]/i","\$1",$tag);
//find the text
preg_match("/\<$tag\>(.*?)\<$tag\>/ism",$text,$match);
if ($match[1]) return $match[1];
else return false;
}

[MrSpeed]

What do these lines do? Replace all characters that are not numbers or letters? I don't understane the $1 part.

//make it preg-safe
$tag=preg_replace("/[^0-9a-z]/i","\$1",$tag);
//find the text
preg_match("/\<$tag\>(.*?)\<$tag\>/ism",$text,$match);

[vincevincevince]

//make it preg-safe
$tag=preg_replace("/([^0-9a-z])/i","\$1",$tag);
//find the text
preg_match("/\<$tag\>(.*?)\<$tag\>/ism",$text,$match);

Oops, badly copied. I missed the brackets. Basically it adds a \ before thigns that aren't numbers or letters (as these are reserved as special regex functions). The preg_match should then match the text within the tag.

[RonPK]

//make it preg-safe
$tag=preg_replace("/([^0-9a-z])/i","\$1",$tag);

FYI, I just learned in another thread that preg_quote() [php.net] does exactly the same...

[vincevincevince]

That's a very useful thing that preg_quote(), I shall make great use of it, thanks