April 2005
Intermediate to advanced
270 pages
7h 13m
English
Content preview from Developing Feeds with RSS and AtomBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Parsing for Programming
The ability to display a feed on a web page is important, no doubt about it, but it’s not going to really excite anyone. To do that, you need to be able to parse feeds inside your own programs. In this section, we’ll look at the two major alternatives, MagpieRSS and the Ultraliberal Feed Parser. Both parsers are libraries; both convert feeds into native data structures; and neither cares whether a feed is RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 or Atom. That, really, is the final word with respect to the Great Battle of the Standards; most of the time, at a programmatic level, no one cares.
PHP: MagpieRSS
The most popular parser in PHP, and arguably the most popular in use on the Web right now, is Kellan Elliott-McCrea’s MagpieRSS. As I write this, it stands at version 0.7, a low number indicative of modesty rather than product immaturity. MagpieRSS is a very refined product indeed.
To use MagpieRSS, first download the latest build from its web page at http://sourceforge.net/projects/magpierss/. There is also a weblog at http://laughingmeme.org/magpie_blog/.
Once downloaded, you’re presented with a load of READMEs and example scripts, plus five include files:
rss_fetch.inc is the library you call from scripts. It deals with retrieving the feed, and marshals the other files into parsing it, before returning the results to your code.
rss_parse.inc deals with the nitty gritty of feed parsing. MagpieRSS is a liberal parser, which means it doesn’t validate the feed it is given. It can ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.