Question

I am trying to parse a rss-feed with php but it gives me nothing. As you can see I am trying to echo both the $doc and the $itemRSS array and it gives me nothing and the “Success!” for when item 0 in the array is never reached.

I would be thrilled if someone could say “have you thought about [idiotic mistake]?”, so please consider me a noob for this question. Thank you!

  $doc = new DOMDocument();
  $doc->load('http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=566903fd393811762dc74aadc701badd&_render=rss');
  $arrFeeds = array();
  foreach ($doc->getElementsByTagName('item') as $node) {
    $itemRSS = array ( 
      'guid' => $node->getElementsByTagName('guid')->item(0)->nodeValue
      );
    array_push($arrFeeds, $itemRSS);
  }

    if ($itemRSS[0] != NULL) {

        echo 'Success!';

    }

echo $itemRSS;
echo $doc; 

And by this I mean that the page is completely blank. No error, nothing.

Update:
Apprently my webhost has allow_url_fopen deactivated, so I have to find another way to do this. sigh

Answer 1

As mentioned in the other answers, you’re doing a couple of things wrong, such as trying to echo arrays and objects. For some reason you’re not getting any results in $arrFeeds either, although you should.

A simpler way to do this is change the render method of the feed to JSON: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=566903fd393811762dc74aadc701badd&_render=json

Then you can use json_decode() to get an array of all items:

$contents = json_decode(file_get_contents('http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=566903fd393811762dc74aadc701badd&_render=json'));
foreach($contents['items'] as $item) {
  // use $item['title'], $item['description'] etc... 
}

Note you can only echo strings, ints, etc. not structured data such as arrays or objects.

To make it easier, you can open that URL in your browser and analyze the JSON contents @ http://json.parser.online.fr/ – you’ll see how your array is structured then.

JSON is a much easier format to work with IMO.

Edit:

Since file_get_contents() is disabled you can use cURL (which should be installed on most servers, especially with allow_url_fopen disabled):

function file_get_contents_curl($url) {
    $ch = curl_init();
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1); //Set curl to return the data instead of printing it to the browser.
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
    $data = curl_exec($ch);
    curl_close($ch);

    return $data;
}