Creating an RSS Reader: the Reader

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>

      <link>www.mylink.com/someplace.html</link>

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

    </item>

    <item>

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

      <link>http://
www.mylink.com/someplace.html /NewsTopStories?m=318</link>

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

    </item>

                             End example text

Code

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

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

A typical RSS document will have the following structure: 

<RSS>

    <channel>

         <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.