Question

I have the following code to read in an XML file:

$xml2 = simplexml_load_file('http://www.facebook.com/feeds/page.php?format=rss20&id=334704593230758'); 
$item = $xml2->channel->item;

I am getting the following back in my source code:

<b>Warning</b>:  simplexml_load_file() [<a href='function.simplexml-load-file'>function.simplexml-load-file</a>]: http://www.facebook.com/feeds/page.php?format=rss20&amp;id=334704593230758:11: parser error : xmlParseEntityRef: no name in <b>/home/content/49/8644249/html/test/_inc/footer.php</b> on line <b>110</b><br />

it continues on like that for 10 more lines. Is there a problem with the xml code?

Answer 1

OK, slightly weirdly since this is an RSS feed and not designed to be directly human-readable, the answer to this is that you have to include a User-Agent: header in your request.

When I load the URL in Chrome a get valid XML document, when I run you code I get the same errors you do. Upon closer inspection I find that when I run your code I actually get a minimal HTML document back, not the desired XML – in order to get the right result you have to pass a valid user agent string, which means you can’t use simplexml_load_file() because it doesn’t support stream contexts.

This code works for me:

// User-Agent string from Chrome. I haven't tested anything else so I don't know
// what is actually required, but this works.
$context = stream_context_create(array(
  'http'=>array(
    'user_agent' => 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1) AppleWebKit/536.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/20.0.1132.57 Safari/536.11'
   )
));

// Get data as a string
$xml2 = file_get_contents('http://www.facebook.com/feeds/page.php?format=rss20&id=334704593230758', FALSE, $context);

// Convert string to a SimpleXML object
$xml2 = simplexml_load_string($xml2);

$item = $xml2->channel->item;