Using cURL and SimpleXML

[katocan]

Well what I'm trying to do is get the RSS feed from Digg but its returning a blank page with nothing.

 

<?php

$curl = curl_init();

curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Digg');
$data = curl_exec($curl);


$xmlFileData = file_get_contents("http://digg.com/rss/index.xml");

$xmlData = new SimpleXMLElement($xmlFileData);


foreach ($xmlData->item as $item) {
echo $item->title;
}

?>

 

 

[sKunKbad]

cURL is not necessary. This is not perfect, but it should get you headed in the right direction:

 

<?php
$feed = simplexml_load_file('http://digg.com/rss/index.xml');
$digg = $feed->channel->item->children('http://digg.com/docs/diggrss/'); //this shows simpleXML how to parse the custom namespace elements
$title = $feed->channel->item->title; //this may not work without being looped so that it parses the entire XML document
echo "<h2>$title</h2>\n";
echo "$digg->diggCount"; //this should get you at the special digg:diggCount element, which shows an example of retrieving info out of custom namespaces
?>

 

There is still some work for you to do with looping through the XML... so let me know if you get stuck again

[sKunKbad]

I tried the code up posted, and for some reason Digg's XML doesn't read in like other XML I have used, so I played around with it, and this is what I came up with (and it works):

 

<?php
$diggFeed = file_get_contents('http://www.digg.com/rss/index.xml');
$feed = new SimpleXMLElement($diggFeed);
$namespaces = $feed->getNamespaces(true);
foreach ($feed->channel->item as $item) {
$title = $item->title;
$guid = $item->guid;
$description = $item->description;
$digg = $item->children($namespaces['digg']);
echo "<p><a href='$guid'>$title</a> by " . $digg->submitter->username . "<br />$description</p><br />\n";
}
?>

[katocan]

Thanks sKunKbad. The only reason I was using cURL was because someone on an IRC said to because it wasn't displaying the information. Thanks again for the help.

[mikeschroeder]

In  terms of simplicity file_get_contents() would be the simplest solution, but if you are requesting information from more than one source I would highly recommend using curl, as it allows you to make requests in parallel to any number of urls. Thus you can fetch as many remote files as you want and the execution time will only occur once for all of your requests. Where as using file_get_contents or other functions, fopen, fsockopen, etc.  you will have to make them one after the other.