Question

I want to read out a specific attribute with Simple XML from an RSS feed.

Example of an item:

<item>
     <category>3500</category>
     <category>20</category>
     <category>17</category>
     <title>Blabla</title>
     <description>Blabla</description>
     <content:encoded>Blabla</content:encoded>
     <link>http://...</link>
     <guid isPermaLink="false">http://...</guid>
     <media:content url="http://image.jpg" medium="image">
              <media:title type="html">caption needed</media:title>
     </media:content>
     <pubDate>Mon, 13 Aug 2012 11:40:53 +0200</pubDate>
</item>

I want to read the url which is in media:content.

To read the other tags I used : $xml->channel->item[$i]->title

To read the media url attribute I tried : $xml->channel->item[$i]->media->attributes()->url

But this just returns NULL. It’s something related to :content which is a namespace.

Answer 1

The name of the element is actually content, not media (which is just an arbitrary prefix which should be associated with a namespace to be well-formed XML). Same with encoded being the element name instead of content.

$xml->item[0]->children('whatever-the-namespace-tied-to-media-is')->content->attributes()->url