Program AWS with PHP
Parsing XML with the built-in PHP XML parser can be tricky. But once you see how it’s done, you’ll be parsing Amazon XML in no time.
Using someone else’s wrapper functions to handle Amazon Web Services requests is a nice shortcut to building applications. But the time inevitably comes when you want to do something that existing wrappers don’t handle. You can either look under the hood and tinker with or add to someone else’s work, or you can build your own scripts from scratch.
The following bit of PHP might be a good start if you’re building
something from the ground up. It uses PHP’s built-in XML parser to
handle AWS responses, so there’s nothing new to install. PHP’s parser
is James Clark’s expat
, and you can find the
documentation at http://www.php.net/xml.
Given an ASIN, this example requests the lite
XML
response and formats the results in an HTML table.
The Code
This code builds an AsinSearch
Amazon request URL
with the asin
value passed in through the
querystring, and retrieves the XML with the fopen( )
function.
PHP’s xml_parse_into_struct
function turns the AWS
response into two arrays—one with tag names
($index
) and the other with values
($values
). Looping through the array, the script
then sets the value when it finds the XML tag it’s looking for. With
the values set, it prints the HTML to the page with the values in
place. Create a file called ASINsearch.php
containing the following code:
<?php
// Set Local variables
$dev_token = "insert developer ...
Get Amazon Hacks now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.