Magento - Error in the Log!

[Stitch Up]

Hi guys

I'm struggling to correct various issues with my Magento based website.

Today I was browsing around the hosted files and noticed the system.log

/public_html/magento/var/log/system.log

This is an error that appears regularly and wonder if it's possible to work out what the heck is wrong?

2015-08-20T18:46:57+00:00 ERR (3): Warning: simplexml_load_string() [function.simplexml-load-string]: ^ in /home/stitchup/public_html/magento/lib/Varien/Simplexml/Config.php on line 510


This is from line 507 onwards of the file config.php - double-dutch to me!!!

public function loadString($string)
{
if (is_string($string)) {
$xml = simplexml_load_string($string, $this->_elementClass);


if ($xml instanceof Varien_Simplexml_Element) {
$this->_xml = $xml;
return true;
}
} else {
Mage::logException(new Exception('"$string" parameter for simplexml_load_string is not a string'));
}
return false;
}


Regards

John

[JSR]

I don't know Magento, but is there any chance this could help: http://digitaldisseny.com/en/blog/72-ma ... ing-issues ?

[ArtyGamer]

While my primary job is software developer, PHP isn't my language of choice so I can't say for sure what's going on here but the sort of error it's throwing up (based on what I can surmise from the code itself) would suggest that there are rogue characters causing the issue. I had something similar myself where I'd written something and gave my clients a little too much credit for understanding that a numeric value should be within a price field, so never ran any sort of substitutions on their input. It wasn't until some months later that one client started to notice errors on their site but I couldn't work out exactly what was causing it.

After messing around on their store from a punter's perspective, I finally got the same error as them. I'd taken a note of which product I had clicked through to, checked all of the fields, and realised that they'd inserted the wrong data into the "RRP" field, so it was expecting a numeric value and they'd instead entered a manufacturer part number, complete with letters. It caused what is essentially a divide-by-zero error but what I'm seeing in the above code would suggest that it's the same thing - the function expects one thing and it's being given something different entirely.

If you can't nail it in the logs, I'd recommend doing what I was doing - browse the store and take a note of every link (C&P it into Notepad or something) prior to clicking through so that you know where you were supposed to be going in case the error shows up. Once you get the error, compare all the data between that product/page and one of the same ilk which DID work. You should hopefully see what the error is.

Sorry I can't help more than that, but PHP isn't my language of choice.

[Stitch Up]

Thanks both for the informative replies - very helpful.

I don't plan on learning PHP/HTML other than when I need to fix things. Ultimately I'll employ someone to correct many of the issues I see that need tidying up.

Thanks again for taking the time.

Regards

John