PHP RSS Parser

PHP 5 allows one to create a RSS parser in a few simple steps. Unfortunately, most hosting companies are still on PHP 4 or in some cases even lower than that. I came across a great simple and powerful RSS parser called lastRSS.

Features

All RSS versions supported (0.9, 1.0 and 2.0)

Transparent cache (doesn’t cache RSS file directly, neither HTML output, but serialized variable; cached data isn’t parsed every time, but you can still access individual fields)

pubDate/lastBuildDate conversion to any date/time format

Character encoding conversion (all encodings supported by iconv library)

Returns an associative array with RSS fields

Regullar expression parsing (very quick)

Strips HTML from description (both hard-coded and entity-coded)

Optional limit the number of returned items

Two ways how to proceed CDATA information (get/strip CDATA content)

Free open-source software (GNU/GPL)

Sample

[php]
// include lastRSS
include "./lastRSS.php";

// Create lastRSS object
$rss = new lastRSS;

// Set cache dir and cache time limit (1200 seconds)
// (don't forget to chmod cahce dir to 777 to allow writing)
$rss->cache_dir = ”;
$rss->cache_time = 0;
$rss->cp = ‘US-ASCII’;
$rss->date_format = ‘l’;

// Try to load and parse RSS file of Slashdot.org
$rssurl = ‘http://www.freshfolder.com/rss.php’;

if ($rs = $rss->get($rssurl)) {
echo ‘

';
    print_r($rs);
    echo '

‘;
}
else {
echo “Error: It’s not possible to get $rssurl…”;
}

?> [/php]