Parsing RSS/XML in php with namespaces

Question

I have some RSS that looks like this:

<item>
<guid isPermaLink="false">2284767032</guid>
<title>title goes here...</title>
<description> Description </description>
<author>author name</author>
<dcterms:valid>start=2012-09-28T17:06:00Z;scheme=W3C-DTF</dcterms:valid>
<media:category scheme="" label="">cat1</media:category>
<media:category scheme="" label="">cat2</media:category>
<media:category scheme="" label="">cat3</media:category>

<media:copyright>Big Company</media:copyright>
<media:keywords>some;keywords;</media:keywords>
<media:group>
<media:content bitrate="643.386" medium="video" duration="72.144" expression="full" fileSize="5802051" framerate="29.97" type="video/x-flv" height="360" url="..." width="640"/>
<media:content bitrate="1242.571" medium="video" duration="72.144" expression="full" fileSize="11205501" framerate="29.97" type="video/x-flv" height="480" url="..." width="854"/>
</media:group>
<link>a234dfasf4f</link>
<plmedia:defaultThumbnailUrl>
  http://url.jpg
</plmedia:defaultThumbnailUrl>
</item>

I'm using the following code to parse it:

  $feed = simplexml_load_file('http://feedurl.com');
  echo "<pre>";
  print_r($feed);
  echo "</pre>";

The problem is that I'm getting all the tags like guid, title, and description, but none of the media:category or media:group or something:anything show up - they are just stripped out.

How can I parse this feed without losing them?

MrCode · Accepted Answer · 2013-01-17 17:58:16Z

1

You need to find where the namespaces are defined, and find the string that the namespaces map to. So for example if the media namespace maps to http://example.com/something:

echo (string)$feed->children('http://example.com/something')->copyright;

Outputs:

Big Company

The result of print_r() with SimpleXML does not always give you the full structure, but the elements are there.

To get the nested elements, try something like:

foreach($feed->children('http://example.com/something')->group->children('http://example.com/something')->content as $content)
{
    echo (string)$content->attributes()->bitrate;
}

edited Jan 17, 2013 at 17:58

answered Jan 17, 2013 at 16:52

MrCode

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6 Comments

wesbos Over a year ago

Would that be in the header of the RSS document?

MrCode Over a year ago

@Wes yes it usually is, for example: <rss xmlns:itunes="http://www.itunes.com/dtds/podcast-1.0.dtd" version="2.0"> this is the definition of the itunes namespace, defined as http://www.itunes.com/dtds/podcast-1.0.dtd.

wesbos Over a year ago

Okay, is there anyway to combine them all into on big object/array?

wesbos Over a year ago

This is working but for the nested ones I get this: wes.io/MFAk - how do I get that information?

MrCode Over a year ago

You could manually add the data to a big array, other than that I don't think so. To get the nested ones I think you'd have to call children() again. See my edit.

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