Simplexml_load_file errors

I'm triying to parse this address in PHP

$url = 'http://pubapi.yp.com/search-api/search/devapi/search?searchloc=91203&term=pizza&format=xml&sort=distance&radius=5&listingcount=10&key=t266jc29dx' ;
$x1 = simplexml_load_file($url);

But here's what I keep getting

Warning: simplexml_load_file(http://pubapi.yp.com/search-api/search/devapi/search?searchloc=91203): failed to open stream: HTTP request failed! HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error in...

As you can see I'm only getting part of the url parameters.

Can you help?

Solution

With some quick searching on how to retrieve XML via cURL this is what I did to retrieve and parse the XML.

The big reason as I mentioned above in a comment is that you can't pass URLs directly into the simple_xml_load_string function with ampersands(&) in them. It's a character in the XML format that represents entities.

<?php

function get_xml_from_url($url){
    $ch = curl_init();

    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.13) Gecko/20080311 Firefox/2.0.0.13');

    $xmlstr = curl_exec($ch);
    curl_close($ch);

    return $xmlstr;
}

$url = 'http://pubapi.yp.com/search-api/search/devapi/search?searchloc=91203&term=pizza&format=xml&sort=distance&radius=5&listingcount=10&key=t266jc29dx';
$contents = get_xml_from_url($url);

$xml = simplexml_load_string($contents);

echo '<pre>';
print_r($xml);
echo '</pre>';
?>