Load external XML and save it using PHP

Question

I want to load and save an external XML file that changes continuously eg "http://something.com/file.xml"

Sometimes the file is not available because server is overloaded or down and I want to use this file instead and re-save it if the next load is available also let people know the file that they are reading is a backup file because the original is not available.

I read about simplexml_load_file and DOMDocument and I don't know which one is the better solution.

Answer 1

$url = "http://www.test.com/xmlfile.xml";
$timeout = 10;

$curl = curl_init();
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, $timeout);

try {
    $response = curl_exec($curl);
    curl_close($curl);

    // success! Let's parse it and perform whatever action necessary here.
    if ($response !== false) {
        /** @var $xml SimpleXMLElement */
        $xml = simplexml_load_string($response);
        $xml->saveXML("tofile.xml");
    } else {
        // Warn the user here
    }
} catch (Exception $ex) {
    // Let user's know that there was a problem
    curl_close($curl);
}