Q: How do I parse values from a RSS feed?

[Charles Stricklin]

If I have an RSS newsfeed like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><!-- generator="whocares" -->
<rss version="0.92">
<channel>
<title>Website Name</title>
<link>http://www.websiteurl.com</link>
<description>Description of website</description>
<lastbuilddate>Sun, 19 Sep 2004 04:34:52 +0000</lastbuilddate>
<docs>http://backend.userland.com/rss092</docs>

<item>
<title>1st Title</title>
<description>1st Description</description>
<link>http://www.websiteurl.com/1stlink/</link>
</item>

<item>
<title>2nd Title</title>
<description>2nd Description</description>
<link>http://www.websiteurl.com/2ndlink/</link>
</item>
</channel>
</rss>

And the following code is used to parse that file/feed:

<?php
$feed = 'http://www.example.com/feed/rss/';

/* ...create and XML parser... */
$xml_parser = xml_parser_create();

/* ...open the feed and parse it... */
$fp = @fopen($feed, 'rb');
if (is_resource($fp)) {
xml_parse_into_struct( $xml_parser, $fp, $vals, $index );
}
@fclose($fp);

/* ...free parser */
xml_parser_free( $xml_parser );
?>

How do I extract the values from $xml_parser?

[Janwillem Borleffs]

Charles Stricklin wrote:

> If I have an RSS newsfeed like this:

[...]

> And the following code is used to parse that file/feed:

[...]

> /* ...open the feed and parse it... */
> $fp = @fopen($feed, 'rb');
> if (is_resource($fp)) {
> xml_parse_into_struct( $xml_parser, $fp, $vals, $index );
> }
> @fclose($fp);

Read the manual closely and you will notice that the second argument of
xml_parse_into_struct() should be a string, not a resource.

The following would work better:

$file = file_get_contents($feed);

if ($file) {
xml_parse_into_struct( $xml_parser, $file, $vals, $index );
}

> How do I extract the values from $xml_parser?

Again, when you read the manual, you will notice that you don't extract the
values from the resource stored in $xml_parser, but that
xml_parse_into_struct() uses the last two arguments to create an array of
keys and values and an array of indexes which matches the positions of the
elements in the document.

Check the output of print_r() on both arrays to see what I mean.

Please read [url]http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.xml.php[/url] for more info and
examples.


JW