Made for a reddit post to help a user.

GetRemoteXLS.php

<?php
// / Specify a url to xml file.
$url = 'localhost/file.xls';
// / Define a function that downloads the xml file and returns only the lines of text within it.
function getRemoteData($url) {
  $ch = curl_init();
  $timeout = 5;
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, $timeout);
  $data = curl_exec($ch);
  curl_close($ch);
  return $data; }
  // / We will now use a foreach on the file.
  foreach($url as $xmlFile){
    $xmlDATA = getRemoteData($xmlFile);
    // / Now we can use srtpos, str_replace, and str_match 
    // / to create and manipulate strings from $xmlDATA.
    if(strpos($xmlDATA, 'author') == true) {
      //do stuff w/str_match to get the vars you want. 
    } 
  }