Avoiding Errors When Attempting to Load an Unavailable File

Using php I want to load XML files from several websites and want to prevent err开发者_Go百科ors if my one of the sites is down. I'm using this code to access the URL.

function get_xml($url){
 $xmlDoc = new DOMDocument();
 $xmlDoc->load($url); // This is the line causing errors
 $channel=$xmlDoc->getElementsByTagName('channel')->item(0);
 ...

If there is no xml feed available at $url I get lots of error messages like:

Warning: DOMDocument::load(): Space required after the Public Identifier

Warning: DOMDocument::load(): SystemLiteral " or ' expected

Warning: DOMDocument::load(): SYSTEM or PUBLIC, the URI is missing

Warning: DOMDocument::load(): Opening and ending tag mismatch: link line 5 and head

What can I do to prevent $url from attempting to load if the feed isn't available? I've tried:

if(file_exists($url)){
$xmlDoc->load('$url');
}

And things with fopen and @load but I could well have been using them incorrectly.

In theory (and if I remember correctly), you should be able to catch those errors (so you call deal with them yourself, instead of having them displayed) using the libxml¹ functions.

I'm especially thinking about libxml_use_internal_errors() :

libxml_use_internal_errors() allows you to disable standard libxml errors and enable user error handling.

^1._{libxml being the library that's using internally by DOMDocument -- and SimpleXML, btw}

Try with:

if (!@$xmlDoc->load($url)){
  return FALSE;
}

Your function get_xml will return immediately FALSE if the method load fails to load the XML data