Mighty Webdeveloper » Conversion http://www.mightywebdeveloper.com Webdevelopment Blog Fri, 14 Mar 2014 11:19:39 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=4.0 Convert MySQL to XML using PHP /coding/mysql-to-xml-php/ /coding/mysql-to-xml-php/#comments Thu, 09 Jun 2011 15:20:51 +0000 /?p=4 Continue reading...]]> How to  convert any MySQL table and data to a well-formed XML document using PHP. Building a  generic solution to a common problem.

In this tutorial we will create a standardized script that will convert a MySQL table of any shape or size into a valid XML document. This can be useful for any situation where you have to transfer data from a MySQL database into an XML based system. In some cases the “mysqldump –xml” might be sufficient. If you require output that’s different from the mysqldump format, or if you don’t have access to the mysqldump tool you will need to code your own solution. Creating a single-use script to handle specific data is of course quite easy, but would require custom coding for each table that needs to be converted to XML. I’m going to show you how (using a handy PHP function) you can build a more generalized solution. This mechanism will allow you to convert a MySQL table to XML, but also to a PHP array, CSV file (even though MySQL already supports CSV natively) or any other required format.

Let’s start with an example table and some data:

Table name: fruit

+--------------+----------------+------------------+--------------+
| fruit_id     | fruit_name     | fruit_colour     | price_per_kg |
+--------------+----------------+------------------+--------------+
| 1            | Banana         | yellow           | 2,99         |
| 2            | Orange         | orange           | 2,45         |
| 3            | Strawberries   | red              | 4,99         |
+--------------+----------------+------------------+--------------+

After running our PHP script the resulting XML will look like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<fruits>
   <fruit>
      <fruit_id>1</fruit_id>
      <fruit_name>Banana</fruit_name>
      <fruit_colour>yellow</fruit_colour>
      <price_per_kg>2,99</price_per_kg>
   </fruit>
   <fruit>
      <fruit_id>2</fruit_id>
      <fruit_name>Orange</fruit_name>
      <fruit_colour>orange</fruit_colour>
      <price_per_kg>2,45</price_per_kg>
   </fruit>
   <fruit>
      <fruit_id>3</fruit_id>
      <fruit_name>Strawberry</fruit_name>
      <fruit_colour>red</fruit_colour>
      <price_per_kg>4,99</price_per_kg>
   </fruit>
</fruits>

Pretty neat huh? ;-) So let’s get down to business and start by setting up our database connection:

<?php
//database configuration
$config['mysql_host'] = "localhost";
$config['mysql_user'] = "root";
$config['mysql_pass'] = "grape01";
$config['db_name']    = "fruit_store";
$config['table_name'] = "fruit";

//connect to host
mysql_connect($config['mysql_host'],$config['mysql_user'],$config['mysql_pass']);
//select database
@mysql_select_db($config['db_name']) or die( "Unable to select database");
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