Simple XML-RPC client for PHP

Once I needed to make some XML-RPC method calls, but faced with the lack of simple implementation of it.

I tried to use different libraries, but they are too complicated. For, example PEAR's xml-rpc implementation is quite difficult to install on Windows and not always possible to install on Linux shared hosting. And XML-RPC for PHP at sourceforge have some problems with UTF-8 characters encoding. So I created my on simple XML-RPC client.

The following class will let you perform XML-RPC method calls from PHP. It also solves encoding problems, since standard PHP xml-rpc methods works bad with non-ANSI UTF-8 characters (e.g. Cyrillic)

class XmlRpcClient {
	public $encoding;
	public $server;
	public $endpoint;

	public function __construct($server, $endpoint, $encoding = 'UTF-8') {
		$this->server = $server;
		$this->endpoint = $endpoint;
		$this->encoding = $encoding;
	}

	public function call($method, $params = array()) {
		$request = xmlrpc_encode_request(
			$method,
			$params,
			array('escaping' => 'markup', 'encoding' => $this->encoding)
		);

		$context = stream_context_create(array('http' => array(
			'method' => "POST",
			'header' => "Content-Type: text/xml
User-Agent: PHPRPC/1.0
Host: ".$this->server."
",
			'content' => $request
		)));

		$server = "http://".$this->server.$this->endpoint;
		$file = file_get_contents($server, false, $context);

		return xmlrpc_decode($file);
	}
}

PS: this is actually an old post from the old version of my blog and I'm publishing it again for 2 reasons:

1. It may be useful for somebody.
2. I have a goal to publish 1 blog post per month and since I don't have time to create a new one, I'll publish the old one.

And Happy New Year to everyone. I wish you productivity, self-fullfilment and enough time to implement the best of your ideas right here and right now!