extracting data from rss feed.

Dave77 · 23 Jul 2006 at 16:09

Hello,

I have a rss xml file that I would like to extract the data between the link, title and description tags into an array for eventual insertion into a db. Is this something thats possible in php without too much work? I have done some php coding before but nothing too complicated and I dont really know where to start with this.

Thanks.

Dave

Augmented · 23 Jul 2006 at 16:16

PHP4 or PHP5?

For PHP4, Magpie is a prebuilt RSS parser.
For PHP5, the native SimpleXML functions make parsing very simple

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Dave77 · 23 Jul 2006 at 16:37

I am using PHP5. I had looked at various prebuilt scripts but many of them seemed overly complicated for what I need..

Magpie looks very nice, will try it shortly

Given that I dont really want to display the data direct from the rss feed I may look at building my own solution from the SimpleXML funcs.

Thanks.

Augmented · 23 Jul 2006 at 18:44

Dave77 said:
Given that I dont really want to display the data direct from the rss feed I may look at building my own solution from the SimpleXML funcs.

There's not much involved. Something of the fashion:

Code:

$feed = 'http://foo.com/bar.xml';
$xml_data = simplexml_load_file($feed);

$info = array('description' => $xml_data->channel->description,
              'language'    => $xml_data->channel->language,
              'link'        => $xml_data->channel->link,
              'title'       => $xml_data->channel->title);

$num = 5; // Number of feed items to retrieve
$items = $xml_data->xpath("//item[position()<=$num]");

should work

.