Question

I am creating a facebook feed plugin for wordpress and have it working when it is using a local file however I need to load into $fb = new SimpleXMLElement($xmlstr);.

$xmlstr is a variable with the XML in, the content inside that file is from here https://www.facebook.com/feeds/page.php?format=rss20&id=133869316660964 .

Is it possible with SimpleXMLElement to store data from a webpage?

I tried using file_get_contents but it didn’t work. When I use that function facebook gives this error: https://i.stack.imgur.com/BKzzM.jpg when using this code: echo "contents: " . file_get_contents('https://www.facebook.com/feeds/page.php?format=rss20&id=133869316660964');

Answer 1

I solved this using the cURL library from PHP.

   // Init a cURL resource
   $ch = curl_init("https://www.facebook.com/feeds/page.php?format=rss20&id=133869316660964");
   curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_POST, false );
   curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true );
   // Make facebook think it is being accessed by a browser to avoid 
   //compatability issues
   curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; 
   Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050915 Firefox/1.0.7");
   curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, false );
   curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true );
   $data = curl_exec( $ch );

From there I set the simple xml as $data.

$fb = new SimpleXMLElement($data);

Hope this helps people in the future!

It’s important to have:

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; 
       Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050915 Firefox/1.0.7");

Because otherwise facebook will think you’re using an out of date browser.