A Simple RSS Reader with SimpleXML

First off, we need to know the location of the XML file, and load it with SimpleXML. We can do that by providing our feed URL and then giving it to SimpleXML. In this example, I'm going to use the feed for Devolio.

$feed = "http://devolio.com/blog/feeds/index.rss";

@simplexml_load_file($feed);

Note that we're suppressing errors by using the (@), just in case the file we're looking for can't be loaded. Now, the first thing we're going to want to grab from our XML file is the title, URL, and description of the feed. If we look at our XML file, we see the following:

< channel>

< title>Devolio< /title>

< link>http://devolio.com/blog/< /link>

< description>News, resources, tips and tricks for Web Developers and Freelancers.< /description>

All of the information we want to get is inside of the channel, so we'll use $rss->channel[0]->name[0] to get what we want.

$title = $rss->channel[0]->title[0];

$url = $rss->channel[0]->link[0];

$desc = $rss->channel[0]->description[0];

Next thing we're going to do is limit how many results we want back from the feed, I'm going to use 10.

$entries = 10;

If we take a look at our XML file again, we'll see that each entry is laid out like so:

< item>

    < title>Hassle-Free PDF Text Extraction< /title>

    < link>http://devolio.com/blog/archives/273-Hassle-Free-PDF-Text-Extraction.html< /link>

    < description>

        desc...

    < /description>

< /item>

This time, each item in the channel will contain it's own title, link, and description. By looping through the items, we can grab as many as we need with $rss->channel[0]->item[$c]->name[0]

$xtitle = $rss->channel[0]->item[$c]->title[0];

$xurl = $rss->channel[0]->item[$c]->link[0];

$xdesc = $rss->channel[0]->item[$c]->description[0];

Now if we put it all together with a few comments, we have a simple 25 line RSS reader. You can download the code for this tutorial or learn more about SimpleXML. Used a different XML parser? Let us know what you used and how well it worked out for you.