I actually really miss my old blog.nuggit.nu. It was poorly designed and poorly coded, yet it's utter simplicity and homeyness was irresistible to me, like a brand new cheap notepad just begging to be written in, absolutely anything. I love when I get that feeling from paper or software. It really nourishes inspiration. So I posted there pretty often. It didn't get too many visitors, but my faithful sister read it once in a while, :) so at least that pushed me to have just enough of a quality standard when posting. I loved it.
That ended when I moved to college. The server was taken down to be set in the dorm room (never to be used again, really, except to get info off of). At least I got the blog database information off before taking out the hard drive to try to house it in a different computer (which didn't work, so that one is now sitting dead on my desk). The problem was, I exported it in XML format. I figured XML was compatible with anything and everything. Right? The important thing was, last I saw, phpmyadmin could take XML to import data.
Ahahaha.
Preparing to upload the XML file to the myphpadmin that nuggit.nu currently uses, I D:'d at SQL being the only file format option to import with. I even booted into Linux to try to import with myphpadmin on there, but it was the same. What happened?! I clearly remember back in the day, having to use XML to import to phpmyadmin... as I Googled this problem, it gradually settled that I probably remembered the complete opposite thing. I probably tried XML first because it was familiar, then had to use SQL. Everywhere I looked recommended SQL for backups.
What a pain in the ass. There were many others that made the same mistake as I, but nobody really had a solution. Of course there were several possible ways to go with it. I could learn MySQL's command line interface, and use ExtractData() in some way. If I knew "a bit of PHP" someone said I could "easily" write a script to read data from the XML file. Yeah, right. I saw that more than a few times, yet people would never give a starting pointer to work from. It is not easy from where I'm standing. I hate when they're so vague.
...it was not til I Googled it while writing this blog post that I found the SimpleXML extension for PHP that does seem to make it quite simple to get data.
I'm going to work on this. I will get my old site back up, at least partially.
Excavating Old Blog Posts
meta, my websites, software | Tuesday, June 23, 2009
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3 comments:
Its been a while since I did a conversion from xml to mysql with php.
http://xkcd.com/327/
Haha, that's one of my favorites.
Did you use SimpleXML when you did that?
I'm about to post another blog with some amateur code. I'm almost scared of what you'd think, now.
I used the following, I stole it from somewhere. I've become better about putting a comment with where I got stuff after I wrote this.
And don't worry, where I'm working I feel like the idiot programmer.
class XMLParser
{
var $parser;
var $filePath;
var $document;
var $currTag;
var $tagStack;
function XMLParser($path)
{
$this->parser = xml_parser_create();
$this->filePath = $path;
$this->document = array();
$this->currTag =& $this->document;
$this->tagStack = array();
}
function parse()
{
xml_set_object($this->parser, $this);
xml_set_character_data_handler($this->parser, 'dataHandler');
xml_set_element_handler($this->parser, 'startHandler', 'endHandler');
if(!($fp = fopen($this->filePath, "r")))
{
die("Cannot open XML data file: $this->filePath");
return false;
}
while($data = fread($fp, 4096))
{
if(!xml_parse($this->parser, $data, feof($fp)))
{
die(sprintf("XML error: %s at line %d",
xml_error_string(xml_get_error_code($this->parser)),
xml_get_current_line_number($this->parser)));
}
}
fclose($fp);
xml_parser_free($this->parser);
return true;
}
function startHandler($parser, $name, $attribs)
{
if(!isset($this->currTag[$name]))
$this->currTag[$name] = array();
$newTag = array();
if(!empty($attribs))
$newTag['attr'] = $attribs;
array_push($this->currTag[$name], $newTag);
$t =& $this->currTag[$name];
$this->currTag =& $t[count($t)-1];
array_push($this->tagStack, $name);
}
function dataHandler($parser, $data)
{
$data = trim($data);
if(!empty($data))
{
if(isset($this->currTag['data']))
$this->currTag['data'] .= $data;
else
$this->currTag['data'] = $data;
}
}
function endHandler($parser, $name)
{
$this->currTag =& $this->document;
array_pop($this->tagStack);
for($i = 0; $i < count($this->tagStack); $i++)
{
$t =& $this->currTag[$this->tagStack[$i]];
$this->currTag =& $t[count($t)-1];
}
}
}
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