Retrieving and Rendering an RSS Feed - PHP

Based on your knowledge of Magpie’s parsing behavior, rendering the feed components should be trivial. Listing 20-2 demonstrates how easy it is to render a retrieved feed within a standard browser.

Listing 20-2. Rendering an RSS Feed with Magpie

<?php
    require("magpie/magpie.php");

    // RSS feed location?
    $url = http://localhost/book/20/blog.xml;
    // Retrieve the feed
    $rss = fetch_rss($url);

    // Format the feed for the browser
    $feedTitle = $rss->channel['title'];
    echo "Latest News from <strong>$feedTitle</strong>";
    foreach ($rss->items as $item) {
       $link = $item['link'];
       $title = $item['title'];
       // Not all items necessarily have a description, so test for one.
       $description = isset($item['description']) ? $item['description'] : "";
       echo  "<p><a href="$link">$title</a><br />$description</p>";
}

?>

Note that Magpie does all of the hard work of parsing the RSS document, placing the data into easily referenced arrays. Figure 20-2 shows the fruits of this script.

Figure 20-2.  Rendering an RSS feed within the browser

As you can see in Figure 20-2, each feed item is formatted with the title linking to the complete entry. So, for example, following the Killer Firefox Tip #294 link will take the user to
http://opensource.apress.com/article/190/.