Question

I want to parse Google News RSS with PHP, to get actual links of the content.

Google News RSS item link looks like this:

http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&usg=AFQjCNGkF58EwDE7aA742GfVP9aE8azmhg&url=http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/15/us-obama-mlk-idUSTRE80E0PD20120115

I need just the actual link, everything after &url= :

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/15/us-obama-mlk-idUSTRE80E0PD20120115

And how would one go about eliminating the “non-essential” part of the URL, in essence targeting everything starting with http://news.google.com and ending with &url= ?

http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&usg=AFQjCNGkF58EwDE7aA742GfVP9aE8azmhg&url=

I do a little regex, but this is out of my reach…

Thanks, fellas!

Answer 1

Regex is not necessarily the best approach here.

$query = parse_url($google_url, PHP_URL_QUERY);
parse_str($query, $parts);
$url = $parts['url'];