Question

long time listener first time caller…

I have this function (I don;t recall where its from sorry, I’ve had it forever)

It simply parses an XML feed and creates a list of upcoming gigs – it was working fine but changing to a new server with latest PHP and it isn’t working.

    function parseRSS($url) { 

    $feedeed = implode('', file($url));
    $parser = xml_parser_create();
    xml_parse_into_struct($parser, $feedeed, $valueals, $index);
    xml_parser_free($parser);

    foreach($valueals as $keyey => $valueal){
        if($valueal['type'] != 'cdata') {
            $item[$keyey] = $valueal;
        }
    }
    $i = 0;
    foreach($item as $key => $value){
        if($value['type'] == 'open') {
            $i++;
            $itemame[$i] = $value['tag']; 
        } elseif($value['type'] == 'close') {

            $feed = $values[$i];
            $item = $itemame[$i];
            $i--;

            if(count($values[$i])>1){
                $values[$i][$item][] = $feed;
            } else {
                $values[$i][$item] = $feed;
            }
        } else {
            $values[$i][$value['tag']] = $value['value'];  
        }
    }
    return $values[0];
} 

$xml = parseRSS("http://acousti.co/feeds/artist/AboveThem");

$count = 0;

foreach($xml['RSS']['CHANNEL']['ITEM'] as $item) {
        $pubDate = $item['PUBDATE'];
        $pubDateFormatted = date('D j M Y', strtotime($pubDate));

        echo("<a href=\"{$item['LINK']}\" target=\"_blank\" class=\"indexBoxNews\">{$item['DESCRIPTION']}{$link}</a>
            <p class=\"rss-date\">$pubDateFormatted</p>");

        if (++$count == 5) break;
}

Does anyone know why it may have stopped working – the code was written pre-PHP5 that’s for sure so maybe it’s a compatibility issue?

Any help very much appreciated 🙂
Rob

Answer 1

Since you’re now on PHP 5, you may want to just rewrite the code using simplexml. PHP4, without adding additional libraries, didn’t have a good easy way of dealing with XML, but now with PHP 5, your code should be a fraction of what you used for PHP 4.

Try this:

$xml = simplexml_load_file('http://acousti.co/feeds/artist/AboveThem');

foreach ($xml->channel->item as $item)
{
    $pubDateFormatted = date('D j M Y', strtotime((string) $item->pubDate));
    echo '<a href="' . (string) $item->link . '" target="_blank" class="indexBoxNews">' . (string) $item->description . '</a>
            <p class="rss-date">' . $pubDateFormatted . '</p>';
}