PHP Universal Feed Parser – lightweight PHP class for parsing RSS and ATOM feeds.

After the PHP Universal Feed Generator, I’ve written the PHP Universal Feed Parser for Orchid Framework. It’s a RSS and ATOM parser written in PHP5. Though there are many feed parsers over Internet, none of those was serving the basic focuses of Orchid: pure object orientation, being lightweight etc. So, I had to write a new one.

UPDATE(15th May, 2008) : cURL support added. Where url fopen() is disabled, the class will use cURL to load the RSS/ATOM content.

Features:

• Parses all channels and feed item tags and sub tags.
• Serve the parsed data as associative array.
• Enough documented and easy to understand code.
• Many ways to get parsed information.
• Parsing includes attributes too.
• No regular expression used.
• Parsed by XML Parser extension of PHP.
• Pure PHP5 objected oriented.
• Enable to parse all commonly used feed versions.

Supported versions: I tried to include all stable and commonly used feed versions. Currently it’s being used to parse the following versions:

• RSS 1.0
• RSS 2.0
• ATOM 1.0

Download:

• Click Here to get the class file with example. (downloaded [downloadcounter(feedparser)] times)
• Download from phpclasses.org.

How to use:

It’s dead simple to use this class. Just follow this 3 steps:

1. Include the file

include(‘FeedParser.php’);

2. Create an object of FeedParser class

$Parser = new FeedParser();

3. Parse the URL you want to featch

$Parser->parse(‘http://www.sitepoint.com/rss.php’);

Done.

Now you can use this functions to get various information of parsed feed:

• $Parser->getChannels() – To get all channel elements as array
• $Parser->getItems() – To get all feed elements as array
• $Parser->getChannel($name) – To get a channel element by name
• $Parser->getItem($index) – To get a feed element as array by it’s index
• $Parser->getTotalItems() – To get the number of total feed elements
• $Parser->getFeedVersion() – To get the detected version of parsed feed
• $Parser->getParsedUrl() – To get the parsed feed URL

A simple example:

Here is a simple example of using this Feed Parser class. Click here to see is the output of this example.

<?php

include('FeedParser.php');

$Parser     = new FeedParser();

$Parser->parse('http://www.sitepoint.com/rss.php');

$channels   = $Parser->getChannels();

$items      = $Parser->getItems();

?>

<h1 id="title"><a href="<?php echo $channels['LINK']; ?>"><?php echo $channels['TITLE']; ?></a></h1>

<p id="description"><?php echo $channels['DESCRIPTION']; ?> </p>

    <a class="feed-title" href="<?php echo $item['LINK']; ?>"><?php echo $item['TITLE']; ?></a>

    <p class="feed-description"><?php echo $item['DESCRIPTION']; ?></p>

<?php endforeach;?>

I hope, this class is so easy that, anyone who have general knowledge about PHP5 can use it. Whatever it is, Feel free to ask me anything, anytime.

Note : Hi all, I’ve reported about some situations from users where this class is not working properly. So, I’ve decided to re-write it ASAP. Hope the next one will be more powerful, smaller in size and easier to use.
— Thanks.