Hi guys,

I'm trying to build an web application that will generate a schedule for cinema times. Basically, the showtimes for a film are taken, along with the film length, and a table is made showing all the films together so you can see where they overlap, when they finish etc.

So they don't have to be entered manually I've got the listings from the Cineworld site and want (for now) the full guide to be shown. Problem being, I haven't got a clue how to use it!

The link given by Cineworld is here. I'm wanting to import the info from listings.xml so I can provide a list of cinemas and then the films and showtimes from that cinema. I'm hoping that I can import some info from the all-performances.xml file too as that contains info (like the run-time) of the films.

So, any suggestions?! I've searched and found a few guides that are aimed at RSS news feeds but none of these look like they'll apply in this case.

Any help is appreciated!

Describe how you plan on displaying the information.
I mention this because the XML files are large and there are many different movie times.

How much of the information are you planning on displaying? ...
and better yet, show us an example web page that you're working on
with some fake info entered, so we an see how your final thing is supposed
to look. This is important because of the different ways to read the XML file.

Give us a link to your URL.

I've had a few problems deciding on how the information will be displayed. I'd like to be a sort of time-table appearance, the hours of the day across the top and blocks displaying the time the film is showing.

I've not actually built anything yet because I'm not sure how I'm going to get the info in the site. I was hoping that I could start once I figured a way of getting the info I want from the XML file into a page. Then I could manipulate it.

The plan was to select the preferred cinema (e.g. Sheffield) and the date you would like to see the schedule for, and then the films and times for them would be displayed in the timetable format.

I'm basically just looking for a way to get the info from the XML files into a php array. I've just found a site that does something very similar here.

just wanted to mention before getting started that on the example link given the details vs dates time doesnt work on my setup.


ubuntu jaunty / firefox3

Import the data into MySQL (equivalent) using the DOM library. This is by no means a complete example but...

$file_name = "feed.xml";
$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->load($file_name);
$toplevel = $doc->getElementsByTagName("a");

// NEEDS TO LOOP THROUGH EACH ELEMENT AND GRAB RESPECTIVE VALUE
foreach( $toplevel as $a) {
$node_1_var = $a->getElementsByTagName("b");
$node_1_val = $node_1_var->item(0)->nodeValue;
// ect....
}

I was about to suggest the DOM library too (annoyingly, domxml in PHP 4). Essentially it's identical to the DOM in Javascript, so if you've used it there, it should be pretty easy in PHP.

If you want to quickly (at least, few lines of code) retrieve certain nodes from XML, you might want to use XPath, also supported by the PHP DOM library.

I've seen problems with using DOM -- and cvsimport as well. Basically if the RSS feed isn't perfect it errors out. For that I use my own script... Its not perfect but I use Curl to grab the raw text then use my own parser through php to sort and sift the data... If you tell it to only look for certain tags from there and to explode the document into those fields, it works with extreme consistantcy even if they have errors in thier rss as the script won't care.

If the RSS feed isn't well-formed XML you'll have a hell of a time trying to get anything out of it.

You can try passing it through something like Tidy to fix it.

he he...

PHP How do I post PHP blocks?

$row = explode('<channel>', $curled);
for ($i=0;$i<count($row);$i++)
{
$title_a = explode('<title>', $row[$i]);
$title = explode('</title>', $title_a[1]);
// Use as $title[0]; and repeat for each data field you want to dump into the database =)
} 


Been using that setup for RSS feeds and CVS imports for years.