Creating an RSS Reader: the Reader

In this article we are going to discuss how to create a PHP-based RSS reader. It would be helpful if you know something about XML, but not really necessary. RSS documents have three main tags: Title, Link and Description. And they all do exactly what their names suggest. I will go into detail about these tags in my second article dealing with “building an RSS file.” For now, we will only focus on the “reading” part of the article.

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By: Jacques Noah

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February 06, 2007

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As an extra I will introduce a database aspect of the reader. We will use the database to store and retrieve the latest stories. To continue with this article you will need PHP 4 and higher and optionally MYSQL.

Below is an example text from an RSS document:

Start example text

<item>

<title>First example</title>

<description>Some description, blah,blah,blah
</description>

</item>

<item>

<title>Thousands set to attend todays celebration</title>

</item>

End example text

Code

To create an RSS Reader in PHP, we need to:

Create a function to read the start tag (start element).
Create a function to read the end tag (endElement).
Create function to read the text associated with the tags.

A typical RSS document will have the following structure:

<RSS>

<item>

</item>

</channel>

</RSS>

A start tag is a tag without the “/” character, for example: <items>. An end tag is a tag with the “/” character, for example: </item>.

So the start and end tag functions will search for the “<item></item>” tags and once they have found those, it will be a simple matter of retrieving the text data from them to display.

Next: XML-related Functions >>