Posted by taps128 on 11/30/07 13:14

eastcoastguyz wrote:
> On Nov 30, 1:23 am, taps128 <nstje...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> eastcoastguyzwrote:
>>> I'm very new to RSS. I was given a URL that starts with "feed:". I
>>> want to be able to open this and read in its content into a PHP
>>> program to produce a report. I'm not interested in converting it to
>>> HTML.
>>> Question: Is a URL that starts with feed: output XML?
>>> Question: How do I open a feed: URL in PHP and parse it?
>>> Thanks!
>>> Edward
>> Open it using fopen, file_get_contects or curl, and read it using
>> simpleXML, or XMLReader.
>
> Thanks for your posting.
>
> I looked at the example for simpleXML on the php.net web site. I was
> able to get the first example working. So I'm starting to understand
> how this might work.
>
> I have some questions. That example.php looks to be XML with a PHP
> envelope (for lack of a better term) around it and then it has a call
> to XML with "XML;". Since I'm new to this, that is a little confusing
> as an example. How would that example be if it was reading from a
> rss.xml file? And what about the "XML;" call?
>
> Thanks everyone!
>
> Edward
>
It's just a string. You can load an xml file directly from a file if you
want.

Like this:
$rss=simplexml_load_file('http://www.somesite.com/rss.xml');

Now you have a SimpleXML object named $rss which you can use to iterate.
Note that this will work faublosly over small files, but the larger the
file tho more time SimpleXML will take to read it. That's because
SimpleXML alows you to navigate the xml tree as you wish, foroward and
backwards how many times you like. To do so it first builds a tree of
the file in the servers memory. For big files it takes a lot of time to
do so.
If you need just tu parse the file, I'd suggest you to use XMLReader
which is way faster to use.

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