PHP 5's ability to read XML files is fantastically easy to use. In the past it was possible but it required quite a bit of long winded code to get any where. PHP 5's
SimpleXmlElement function makes working with XML a breeze, and with much less code too! Let's take the following example:
Code: Select all
$feed = file_get_contents('http://www.mywebsite.com/rss/');
$rss = new SimpleXmlElement($feed);
foreach($rss->channel->item as $entry) {
echo "<p><a href='$entry->link' title='$entry->title'>" . $entry->title . "</a></p>";
}
In the above example we want to display the contents of an RSS feed, in our example
http://www.mywebsite.com/rss/. Using the
file_get_contents function we can get the contents of this RSS file and put them in a variable called
$feed. We then use the
SimpleXmlElement function to process the RSS feed and put it in a format we can use. This usable format (now an objext) is stored in
$rss.
The
$rss object can now be used to get any information that was in our RSS feed. The foreach loop does just that, looping through each
item.
It really is that simple, and there's loads more you can do with the
SimpleXmlElement class - check out the
PHP documentation for more.
