Warning: simplexml_load_string(): ****/petfinder-listings.php line 247

Hi,

Can you tell me your shelter ID? Could there be HTML in one of your recently pet’s descriptions?

Thank you for the fast reply. Our shelter ID is NY1119.

As an aside, we’re updating Petfinder using Shelter Manager, but we’ve been using it for the past 8 months. I’ll log in to that to make sure that we don’t have any random formatting in our writeups.

Hi, I’m not having any issues with your petfinder feed. I can see Misty, Samathan, Zeke, etc. when I put [shelter_list shelter_id=”NY1119″] in a page on my test site. Can you try taking out the shortcode and see if you have any other errors on the page?

Removing the shortcode causes the page to load with no errors.

Hi Bridget,

We just deployed a site to godaddy’s hosting today that uses the petfinder-listings plugin. We’re running into a similar problem described above. In the petf_shelter_list function of petfinder-listings.php, we’ve echoed out $response on line 245, and see that Petfinder is returning a 404. Oddly enough, when we just paste the petfinder API request URL (the commented-out echo on line 246) its using into the browser, we get the XML results, as expected.

Not sure where to go from here. We’ve made sure that allow_url_fopen is on in PHP and curl is installed.

I am having the same issue and had to remove the plugin. I can hit my API URL fine, but using the plugin I’m getting the line 247 error that others are getting above.

If your Petfinder API URL works in a browser (https://api.petfinder.com/shelter.getPets?key=….), then the issue is with your PHP configuration. PHP Functions wp_remote_get and simplexml_load_string need to work at your host. You might need to view your log file or configure PHP to display errors so you can tell which function isn’t working.

If you want to provide your shetler’s Petfinder ID, I can check to be sure your Petfinder account is configured correctly.

Thanks for getting back to me! I’m confused about why this would have started happening suddenly, though – it worked great before and then the page just started displaying errors. I’m not aware of any changes to the host.

Petfinder ID is MD392.

Hi –

I tried your Petfinder ID, MD392, and it worked fine on my test site. Something with PHP must have changed on your site. Was PHP upgraded or did you edit any php.ini files in your website’s directory?

I didn’t touch anything with the website, and I can’t find any communications from them or logs that indicate any updates to PHP. WordPress may have automatically updated, but as far as I can tell, nothing changed with the host.

Hi,
We just started getting the Warning: simplexml_load_string(): error. As far as I know, nothing changed; but it is possible that something was upgraded or changed by the web host.

I removed the short code, and the page worked fine. There have not been any changes to the listings recently.

Our Petfinder ID is VA208
https://adoptaspotdalrescue.com/?page_id=147

I see that others have had this problem. How did you resolve this?

Thank you for any help!