PHP XLST extension

[Adam20002]

Ok here goes i fairly new to the world of PHP so bare with me. I want to transform some xml files using xslt and i want to do it using PHP. Ok so far. Now on my local machine i installed the sablotron processor and xslt extension and transformed away happily. On my web host its a different matter. They don't have php configured with the xslt extension and calling phpinfo() tells me they have xml support using expat.

Ok so what im asking is what do i need to ask them to install. Can they just re-config with the --enable-xslt option set and then i can do what i need through expat or do they need to install sablotron as well.

Hope that made sense...

Adam

[brothercake]

They do need to install Sablotron, which on a Unix machine means re-compiling PHP.

I've had two experiences of this:

- one host said fine, and did it in a couple of hours for no charge. But that was a virtual-hosting account (using VM servers) so blatantly they can take big risks with server stability without having to worry

- another host, shared space on a co-located server, said they'd need 2 days of staging time and still couldn't guarantee that it would work stably after that. I told them to forget it.

It's tricky, because Sablotron is not exactly uber-stable, and reliable unix-installation documentation is hard to find.

So it's pot luck basically - they might be prepared/able to do it, or not. I wouldn't recommend you use expat if you can possibly help it (which gives you a non-validating serial parser, not DOM or XSLT).

The host I use for brothercake.com - the one that was quite happy to do it, and it works perfectly - is http://www.jaguarpc.com It's all cool, but it's a budget service using VM servers - fine for most personal or semi-pro sites, but I wouldn't host a big corporate website on that kind of deal.

[Adam20002]

Brothercake, thanks for the help.

From what you have said i guess i could ask them but for the sake of two or three pages im not sure its going to be worth the hassle. I may look into hosting the relevant pages on a Microsoft server or maybe even limit myself to client side parsing using MSXML and put up with the browser restrictions for now. The pages are only for my own experimentation anyway.

As you say i think i will avoid Expat. Looking at the PHP manual it seems far to complicated to bother with what i need. Seems like i would just be re-inventing the wheel using PHP to pull out data and sticking it in an HTML file rather than getting it to do the transform via XSLT.

Thanks for you help.

Adam

[Jeewhizz]

I run salbotron on my hosting server for several clients and its really stable - I'm running version 0.96

Jee

[brothercake]

On a unix machine? Do you know of good documentation that describes the installation, cos I've only ever been able to get it to work on Windows?

[Nightfire]

I('ve got no idea about php and xml, but maybe the latest version of php might help you

http://www.php.net/ChangeLog-5.php

[Jeewhizz]

Originally posted by brothercake
On a unix machine? Do you know of good documentation that describes the installation, cos I've only ever been able to get it to work on Windows?

I cheated a bit and used a program called easyapache that comes with cpanel (a control panel system) and it installed it for me.

PM-ing you in 5 mins

Jee