CodeIgniter 4 How To Read XML Data to JSON Tutorial

Interacting with XML data and transforming it into JSON format is a common need in web development, especially when dealing with various data sources. In CodeIgniter 4, converting XML data to JSON enables developers to process and manipulate data more efficiently by leveraging a widely accepted data format.

In this tutorial, we’ll see the comprehensive process of reading XML data and converting it to JSON using CodeIgniter 4. This functionality empowers developers to handle XML data sources and transform them into the more flexible and widely supported JSON format.

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Let’s get started.

CodeIgniter 4 Installation

To create a CodeIgniter 4 setup run this given command into your shell or terminal. Please make sure composer should be installed.

composer create-project codeigniter4/appstarter codeigniter-4

Assuming you have successfully installed application into your local system.

Environment (.env) Setup

When we install CodeIgniter 4, we will have env file at root. To use the environment variables means using variables at global scope we need to do env to .env

Either we can do via renaming file as simple as that. Also we can do by terminal command.

Open project in terminal

cp env .env

Above command will create a copy of env file to .env file. Now we are ready to use environment variables.

Enable Development Mode

CodeIgniter starts up in production mode by default. You need to make it in development mode to see any error if you are working with application.

Open .env file from root.

# CI_ENVIRONMENT = production

 // Do it to 
 
CI_ENVIRONMENT = development

Now application is in development mode.

XML Data Preparation

Suppose we have a xml file inside /public folder as students.xml

students.xml contains this XML data.

<?xml version='1.0' standalone='yes'?>
<students>
    <student>
      <rollNo>2</rollNo>
      <name>Sanjay Kumar</name>
      <gender>Male</gender>
      <subjects>
         <subject>English</subject>
         <subject>Hindi</subject>
         <subject>Physics</subject>
      </subjects>
    </student>
    <student>
      <rollNo>5</rollNo>
      <name>Vijay Kumar</name>
      <gender>Male</gender>
      <subjects>
         <subject>Hindi</subject>
         <subject>Physics</subject>
      </subjects>
    </student>
    <student>
      <rollNo>6</rollNo>
      <name>Ashish Kumar</name>
      <gender>Male</gender>
      <subjects>
         <subject>English</subject>
         <subject>Hindi</subject>
      </subjects>
    </student>
    <student>
      <rollNo>10</rollNo>
      <name>Dhananjay Negi</name>
      <gender>Male</gender>
      <subjects>
         <subject>English</subject>
         <subject>Hindi</subject>
         <subject>Physics</subject>
      </subjects>
    </student>
</students>

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Create Controller

Open project into terminal and run this spark command.

php spark make:controller Site --suffix

It will create a file SiteController.php inside /app/Controllers folder.

Open file and write this complete code into it.

<?php

namespace App\Controllers;

use App\Controllers\BaseController;

class SiteController extends BaseController
{
    public function index()
    {
        $xml = simplexml_load_string(file_get_contents(FCPATH . "students.xml"));
        // convert the XML string to JSON
        $jsonData = json_encode($xml, JSON_PRETTY_PRINT);

        echo "<pre>";
        print_r($jsonData);
    }
}

FCPATH . “students.xml” this returns file from /public folder whereas if file is inside /writable folder then we should write like WRITEPATH . “students.xml”

Create Route

Open Routes.php from /app/Config folder. Add this route into it.

//...

$routes->get('/data', 'SiteController::index');

//...

Application Testing

Open project terminal and start development server via command:

php spark serve

URL: http://localhost:8080/data

That’s it.

We hope this article helped you to learn about How To Read XML Data to JSON in CodeIgniter 4 Tutorial in a very detailed way.

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