PHP – XML To JSON Proxy

Today I was looking for a way to easily pull in RSS feed data from Apple Trailers onto my site via AJAX. At first I was thinking about using jQuery to do it but then I got thinking about how cool it would be to have a PHP script that transforms any XML file into JSON. Thus, the following PHP script was written:

$json = json_encode(simplexml_load_string(file_get_contents($_GET['url'])));
if(isset($_GET['jsonp'])) {
  $json = "{$_GET['jsonp']}($json);";
}
echo $json;

Pretty cool, right?! The above five lines can be used to make a proxy which can convert XML to JSON or even JSONP. Let’s say I had this script at http://example.com/xml-to-json.php. With such a script in place one could simply pull the JSON version of the Apple Trailers RSS feed from http://example.com/xml-to-json.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Ftrailers.apple.com%2Ftrailers%2Fhome%2Frss%2Fnewtrailers.rss. The JSONP equivalent (using loadTrailers as the callback function) would be http://example.com/xml-to-json.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Ftrailers.apple.com%2Ftrailers%2Fhome%2Frss%2Fnewtrailers.rss&jsonp=loadTrailers. Believe it or not, it is really that easy!!! 😎