Converting Xml to Json by Php

July 14, 2014 3 min 34 s

{% blockquote Chris Maden %} XML is like violence: if it doesn’t solve your problem, you aren’t using enough of it. {% endblockquote %}

This post aims to convert bulk of xml data in a folder to the json(Javascript String Object Notation) format. Through this way we can remove unwanted data or filter the data to a specific format, thus increasing the flexibility of our output data.

simplexml_load_file()

This function converts XML document into an object.

$xml = '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
			<country>
				<city>
					Alor Star
				</city>
			</country>';

$xml = simplexml_load_file($xml);
echo $xml->country->city;
// Alor Star

json_encode()

json_encode() changes all input value into a JSON representation of value.

echo json_encode([a, 'string', 3, <tag>]);
//["a", "string", 3, "<tag>"]

Also, we can add options like JSON_UNESCAPED_UNICODE to make sure foreign character like ひらがな　doesn’t break. Also JSON_PRETTY_PRINT to do as it said (print nicely).

glob()

glob() provides convenient way to match many files in a folder according to the pattern given.

foreach(glob("images/*.{png,jpg}", GLOB_BRACE)) {
	// do something with all png and jpg format images
}

The optional parameter GLOB_BRACE expands {png,jpg} to match ‘png’ or ‘jpg’. We can omit it if we only have single pattern to match. For instance glob("*.xml") to match all xml extension files.

basename()

This function returns the base name of given path.

echo basename("path/xml/first.xml", ".xml");
// first

This is useful when we want to rename our new json files similar from the xml files. For instance, we will want data in first.xml to be store in first.json.

fopen(), fwrite(), fclose()

Let’s see how we can create new file and write new data into it.

// open a file 		
$handle = fopen('file.txt', 'w') or die("Failed to open file.");
// write data to file
fwrite($handle, 'Some new data');
// close the file
fclose($handle);

3 steps. Open the file, copy the data and close it. The second parameter of fopen() indicates the type of access. In this case w means open for writing only. If the file doesn’t exist, it will create a new one. If we just want to read the file we can use r.

###Start Converting Revision is done and we can start converting now. Let’s us assume our folder structure as below:

index.php
--\xml
		first.xml
		two.xml
		three.xml
--\json

All of our existed xml files are stored in the xml folder. We will convert all of these files into the json format and place them in the json folder. In this blog, I will convert xml data which contain information of all countries in the world. index.php might looks like this:

<?php 
header("Content-Type: application/json") // set the header content-types

function xml2json($file){
	// main function to do the convertion
}

$xmlfiles = glob('xml/*.xml')	// get ready for the xml files
foreach ($xmlfiles as $xmlfile){
	// loop through each file
	// create new file, copy data
}

?>

The index.php is mainly divided into 2 main parts - function and the loop. Let’s write the code for the former.

function xml2json($file){
	if(file_exist($file)) {
		// if the file exist, convert them into object
		$xml = simplexml_load_file($file);
		$output = [];

		foreach ($xml->country as $key->$value) {
			$filtered_xml = [];
			// here is where we filter data etc. You can even do something
			// like convert epoch time to human readable time here.
			$filtered_xml["name"] = $value["name"];
			$filtered_xml["currency"] = $value["currency"];

			// convert them into pretty JSON string
			$json = json_encode(($filter_xml), JSON_PRETTY_PRINT | JSON_UNESCAPED_UNICODE);
			array_push($output, $json);
		}

		//separate all objects by comma 
		return "[" . implode(",", $output) ."]";

	} else {
			exit("Failed to open". $file);
	}
}

Here to make it simpler, we only take 2 data from xml which is name and currency. Next let’s code the 2nd part.

// loop through directory for each xml file
$xmlfiles = glob('xml/*.xml');

foreach ($xmlfiles as $xmlfile) {
    //set the output file name to .json
    $filename = basename($xmlfile, ".xml").".json";
    $result = xml2json($xmlfile);
    //create new file

    $handle = fopen($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] ."/xml2json/json/". $filename, "w") or die ('Cannot open file: ' .$filename);

    //write json data into new file
    if( fwrite($handle, $result) === FALSE) {
        echo "Cannot write to file.";
        exit;
    }

    echo "Success wrote date to file:" .$filename ."\n";
    fclose($handle);
    }

Nothing difficult here, just step by step. First we store all the files to convert in the $xmlfiles variable. Next we loop through each of them, create new file and write all the data which is return from our xml2json() function. Note that $_SERVER['DOCYMENT_ROOT'] returns current environment path, in this case http://localhost:. Finally we close the file using the function fclose().

This is the first part of my mini project. Each week I will try to update a mini project(mostly PHP) to keep myself learning. That’s all for this post. The result of the output data can be viewed here.

###Resource

PHP manual