PHP and PEAR package RSS

[blue_harvester]

I can't seem to get the XML\RSS.php PEAR package to work. I've downloaded it fine but I can't seem to get the require_once directive to import the package. I also downloaded the DB.php PEAR package and this works perfectly. Any ideas?

 

[Augmented]

Is your Pear directory part of your include path?
What is the code you're using for the require_once line?
What error message are you getting?

You would normally include the RSS package via:

require_once 'XML/RSS.php';

 

[blue_harvester]

I'm not actually getting an error message. I'm bit of a PHP newbie so is there somewhere I should turn on error messaging?

Basically what I have are two files, db_test.php and rss_test.php:

db_test.php

<?php
require_once 'DB.php';
echo 'hello!';
?>

rss_test.php

<?php
require_once 'XML/RSS.php';
echo 'hello!';
?>

When I launch the db_test.php I see the "hello!" output but not when I run the rss_test.php. I also tried running the following script using the RSS.php package:

<?php
require_once 'XML/RSS.php';

echo 'hello!';

$rss =& new XML_RSS("http://slashdot.org/slashdot.rdf");
$rss->parse();

echo "<h1>Headlines from <a href=\"http://slashdot.org\">Slashdot</a></h1>\n";
echo "<ul>\n";

foreach ($rss->getItems() as $item) {
    echo "<li><a href=\"" . $item['link'] . "\">" . $item['title'] . "</a></li>\n";
}

echo "</ul>\n";
?>

When this script didn't work I knew something wasn't right.

Any help is much appreciated.

 

[Beansprout]

Try a backslash in the include maybe, if you're on Windows?

 

[Augmented]

When you say you 'downloaded' the packages, did you just download them straight off the Pear site? In case you have, you're likely to run into a great deal of problems with package dependencies (RSS requires XML_Parser and Pear, for example).

Pear packages should be ideally installed using the command line package manager with pear install <packagename>. Installing RSS would require pear install --alldeps XML_RSS.

As for error messaging, at the top of your script, add:

error_reporting(E_ALL);
ini_set('display_errors', 1);

 

[blue_harvester]

As far as I can remember I tried downloading the RSS package using the install command but it complained about dependencies, so I tried the --alldepends switch but I got a message saying that it was unable to download dependencies. Therefore I used the install command to download the dependencies first and then the RSS package. This seemed to work fine but I guess this might be where the problem lies.

Is it possible to just try downloading the package again using the --alldepends switch over the top of the existing install? If so I'll try this tonight when I get home from work.

 

[Augmented]

Is it possible to just try downloading the package again using the --alldepends switch over the top of the existing install? If so I'll try this tonight when I get home from work.

Yes, it won't download what you already have. The option is --alldeps, not --alldepends.

If you've got everything through Pear, then the installation process shouldn't have caused the problems, but you may well be missing a dependency higher up. As far as I can see, XML_RSS needs XML_Parser, XML_Tree and Pear, but I'm not certain about that.

When I launch the db_test.php I see the "hello!" output but not when I run the rss_test.php

If this is happening then it is likely that a Fatal Error is occuring in your require_once line, but you need to enable display_errors or up the level of reporting to see exactly what the problem is. It's difficult to suggest a fix without knowing the exact error .

 

[blue_harvester]

Got it working guys. The XML_Parser was missing. I had to download his package separately as --alldeps didn't seem to work. Anyway it's working now so thanks everyone for the input.