Question

I’m using the SimplePie (and have used MagPie) open source RSS parsers. I have been able to fetch an RSS feed and display the title, description and date on to a webpage.

I have attempted to insert data in to a MySQL database, but have failed in some ways, which leads to the confusion.

require_once 'rss_fetch.inc';

$url = 'http://macrumors.com/rss.xml';
$rss = fetch_rss($url);

echo "Site: ", $rss->channel['title'], "<br>";

foreach ($rss->items as $item ) {
    $title = $item[title];
    $url   = $item[link];
    $pub   = $item[pubdate];
    $desc  = $item[description]; 

    echo "<a href=$url>$title</a></li><br>";
    echo "$pub<br>";
    echo "<p>$desc</p><br>";
    echo "<br>";

That is the code in order to fetch from the RSS feed (in this example I’m using Macrumors) and here is the code I’m using to insert in to a MySQL database.

 mysql_query("INSERT INTO articles (title, linkto, published, contents) VALUES ('$title', '$url','$pub','$desc')"); 

Whilst I’m fetching and displaying at least 20 articles, when I refresh the script only 3 “articles” are inserted in to the database. If I remove the posting of the description in to contents from my MySQL query I am able to insert all of the titles and other data that I have fetched.

So I am unsure whether my problem is with my RSS script or the way I’m inserting in to the database.

Answer 1

Most likely you’re not using mysql_real_escape_string() to make sure that the text is escaped before putting it into your SQL string. If description contains any ', you’ll end up with something like;

INSERT into xx (yy) VALUES ('don't');

The string will end at the ' in don't and the rest of the text will cause a syntax error.