Obtaining USPS orders tracking status with PHP

Question

Error is thrown when trying to retrieve the status of a USPS order using the USPS Tracking API.

However, when running the code I built based on the USPS manual, I am getting the following error: "80040B19XML Syntax Error: Please check the XML request to see if it can be parsed.USPSCOM::DoAuth"

Link to the manual: https://www.usps.com/business/web-tools-apis/track-and-confirm-v1-3a.htm

Here is my code:

$trackingNumber = 123456;
$url = "http://production.shippingapis.com/shippingAPI.dll";
$service = "TrackV2";
$xml = rawurlencode("
<TrackRequest USERID='MYID'>
    <TrackID ID=".$trackingNumber."></TrackID>
    </TrackRequest>");
$request = $url . "?API=" . $service . "&XML=" . $xml;
// send the POST values to USPS
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$request);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPGET, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
// parameters to post

$result = curl_exec($ch);
//var_dump($result);
curl_close($ch);

$response = new SimpleXMLElement($result);
//print_r($result);
$deliveryStatus = $response->TrackResponse->TrackInfo->Status;
echo $deliveryStatus;

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

While I'm sure the original author resolved their issue by now, having come to this example and finding it didn't work I figured I would address the issues:

First thing to address is that PHP converts the tracking number into scientific notation if the tracking number is all numbers as in the example above (test tracking number I used was an all numeric string of 22 characters). So I encased the numbers in single quotes to treat it as a string instead of a number. This issue was only discovered after the next one was addressed.

for the $xml, the ID needs to be encased in double quotes. So the code should be:

$xml = rawurlencode("
<TrackRequest USERID='MYID'>
    <TrackID ID=\"".$trackingNumber."\"></TrackID>
    </TrackRequest>");

Making these two changes resolved the posters original issue. Hope this helps anyone who also stumbles here.

Answer 2

For getting details from XML content, in PHP rather than using curl you can use simplexml_load_file

It will be like:

<?php
    $xml=simplexml_load_file('http://production.shippingapis.com/ShippingApi.dll?API=TrackV2&XML=<TrackFieldRequest USERID="MYID"><TrackID ID="'.$trackingNumber.'"></TrackID></TrackFieldRequest>') or die('Error: Cannot create object');
    echo $xml->TrackInfo->TrackSummary->Event."<br>";
    echo $xml->TrackInfo->TrackSummary->EventDate."<br>";
    echo $xml->TrackInfo->TrackSummary->EventTime;
?>