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<title>Magpie RSS - PHP RSS Parser</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS"
href="http://laughingmeme.org/magpierss.rdf" />
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<img src="magpie-photo.jpg">
<h1>MagpieRSS</h1>
<p>
<h2>MagpieRSS provides an XML-based (expat) RSS parser in PHP.</h2>
<p>
MagpieRSS is compatible with RSS .9 through RSS 1.0, and supports the
RSS 1.0's modules. (with a few exceptions)
<p>
<div class="nav">
<center><h3>Project Info</h3></center>
<ul>
<li><a class="nav"
href="http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=55691">Download
Magpie</a></li>
<li><a class="nav"
href="http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=55691">Mailing
Lists</a></li>
<li><a class="nav" href="#news">News!</a></li>
<li><a class="nav" href="#why">Why?</a></li>
<li><a class="nav" href="#features">Features</a></li>
<li><a class="nav" href="#philosophy">Philosophy</a></li>
<li><a class="nav" href="#usage">Usage Examples</a></li>
<li><a class="nav" href="/cookbook.html">Cookbook</a></li>
<li><a class="nav" href="#todo">Todo</a></li>
<li style="list-style: none; padding-top: 5px;"><a title="Keep up on MagpieRSS news via RSS" href="http://laughingmeme.org/magpierss.rdf"><img
src="http://magpierss.sf.net/black_grey_magpie_news.gif" border="0"></a></li>
</ul>
</div>
<a name="news"></a>
<h3>News!</h3>
<ul>
<li class="news">
<a
href="http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=55691">MagpieRSS
0.51 Released</a>
<ul>
<li> important bugfix!</li>
<li> fix <a href="http://laughingmeme.org/archives/000811.html
">"silent failure"</a> when PHP doesn't have zlib</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li class="news">
<a href="http://minutillo.com/steve/feedonfeeds/">Feed On Feeds Uses Magpie</a>
<ul>
<li> server based PHP RSS aggregator built with MagpieRSS</li>
<li> easy to install, easy to use.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li class="news">
<a
href="http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=55691&release_id=158897">MagpieRSS
0.5 Released</a>
<ul>
<li> supports transparent HTTP gzip content negotiation for reduced bandwidth usage</li>
<li> quashed some undefined index notices</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li class="news">
<a
href="http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=55691&release_id=139643">MagpieRSS
0.46 Released</a>
<ul>
<li> minor release, more error handling clean up</li>
<li> documentation fixes, simpler example</li>
<li> new <a href="/TROUBLESHOOTING">trouble shooting</a> guide for installation and usage problems</a>
</ul>
</li>
<li class="news">
<a
href="http://laughingmeme.org/magpierss.rdf">Magpie News as RSS</a>
<ul>
<li> releases, bug fixes, releated stories as an RSS feed</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li class="news">
<a
href="http://magpierss.sourceforge.net/cookbook.html">MagpieRSS
Cookbook: Simple PHP RSS How Tos</a>
<ul>
<li> answers some of the most frequently asked Magpie questions</li>
<li> feedback, suggestions, requests, recipes welcome</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li clas="news">
<a href="http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=55691&release_id=134850">MagpieRSS 0.4 Released!</a>
<ul>
<li> improved error handling, more flexibility for script authors,
backwards compatible</li>
<li> new and better examples! including using MagpieRSS and <a
href="http://smarty.php.net">Smarty</a></li>
<li> new Smarty plugin for RSS date parsing</li>
</ul>
<br />
</li>
<!--
<li class="news">
<a href="http://www.infinitepenguins.net/rss/">Infinite Penguin now
supports Magpie 0.3</a>
<ul>
<li> simple, sophisticated RSS viewer</li>
<li> includes auto-generated javascript ticker from RSS feed</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li class="news">
<a
href="http://traumwind.tierpfad.de/blog/magpie/magpie_alike.php">Traumwind
releases REX backend for MagpieRSS</a>
<ul>
<li>drop in support using regex based XML parser</li>
<li>parses improperly formed XML that chokes expat</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li class="news">
<a
href="http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=55691&release_id=118652">
MagpieRSS 0.3 Released!</a>
<ul>
<li>Support added for
<a href="http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/archives/001132.html">HTTP
Conditional GETs</a>.</li>
<li>See <a href="http://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?group_id=55691&release_id=118652">ChangeLog</a>
for more info.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li class="news">MagpieRSS 0.2!</a>
<ul>
<li>Major clean up of the code. Easier to use.</li>
<li>Simpler install on shared hosts.</li>
<li>Better documentation and comments.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li class="news">We've <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/magpierss/">moved to
Sourceforge!</a></li>
-->
</ul>
</p>
<p>
<a name="why"></a>
<h3>Why?</h3>
I wrote MagpieRSS out of a frustration with the limitations of existing
solutions. In particular many of the existing PHP solutions seemed to:
<ul>
<li>use a parser based on regular expressions, making for an inherently
fragile solution
<li>only support early versions of RSS
<li>discard all the interesting information besides item title, description,
and link.
<li>not build proper separation between parsing the RSS and displaying it.
</ul>
In particular I failed to find any PHP RSS parsers that could sufficiently
parse RSS 1.0 feeds, to be useful on the RSS based event feeds we generate
at <a href="http://protest.net">Protest.net</a>.
</p>
<p>
<a name="features"></a>
<h3>Features</h3>
<ul>
<li class="toplevel">
<h4>Easy to Use</h4>
As simple as:
<pre>
require('rss_fetch.inc');
$rss = fetch_rss($url);
</pre>
</li>
<li class="toplevel">
<h4>Parses RSS 0.9 - RSS 1.0</h4>
Parses most RSS formats, including support for
<a href="http://www.purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/">1.0 modules</a> and limited
namespace support. RSS is packed into convenient data structures; easy to
use in PHP, and appropriate for passing to a templating system, like
<a href="http://smarty.php.net">Smarty</a>.
</li>
<li>
<h4>Integrated Object Cache</h4>
Caching the parsed RSS means that the 2nd request is fast, and that
including the rss_fetch call in your PHP page won't destroy your performance,
and force you to reply on an external cron job. And it happens transparently.
</li>
<li>
<h4>HTTP Conditional GETs</h4>
Save bandwidth and speed up download times with intelligent use of
Last-Modified and ETag.<br /> See <a
href="http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/archives/001132.html">HTTP Conditional Get for RSS Hackers</a>
</li>
<li><h4>Configurable</h4>
Makes extensive use of constants to allow overriding default behaviour, and
installation on shared hosts.
</li>
<li><h4>Modular</h4>
<ul>
<li>rss_fetch.inc - wraps a simple interface (<code>fetch_rss()</code>)
around the library.
<li>rss_parse.inc - provides the RSS parser, and the RSS object
<li>rss_cache.inc - a simple (no GC) object cache, optimized for RSS objects
<li>rss_utils.inc - utility functions for working with RSS. currently
provides <code>parse_w3cdtf()</code>, for parsing <a
href="http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime">W3CDTF</a> into epoch seconds.
</ul>
</ul>
</p>
<p>
<a name="philosophy"></a>
<h3>Magpie's approach to parsing RSS</h3>
Magpie takes a naive, and inclusive approach. Absolutely
non-validating, as long as the RSS feed is well formed, Magpie will
cheerfully parse new, and never before seen tags in your RSS feeds.
</p>
<p>
This makes it very simple support the varied versions of RSS simply, but
forces the consumer of a RSS feed to be cognizant of how it is
structured.(at least if you want to do something fancy)
</p>
<p>
Magpie parses a RSS feed into a simple object, with 4 fields:
<code>channel</code>, <code>items</code>, <code>image</code>, and
<code>textinput</code>.
</p>
<p>
<h4>channel</h4>
<code>$rss->channel</code> contains key-value pairs of all tags, without
nested tags, found between the root tag (<rdf:RDF>, or <rss>)
and the end of the document.
</p>
<p>
<h4>items</h4>
<code>$rss->items</code> is an array of associative arrays, each one
describing a single item. An example that looks like:
<pre>
<item rdf:about="http://protest.net/NorthEast/calendrome.cgi?span=event&ID=210257">
<title>Weekly Peace Vigil</title>
<link>http://protest.net/NorthEast/calendrome.cgi?span=event&ID=210257</link>
<description>Wear a white ribbon</description>
<dc:subject>Peace</dc:subject>
<ev:startdate>2002-06-01T11:00:00</ev:startdate>
<ev:location>Northampton, MA</ev:location>
<ev:enddate>2002-06-01T12:00:00</ev:enddate>
<ev:type>Protest</ev:type>
</item>
</pre><p>
Is parsed, and pushed on the <code>$rss->items</code> array as:
<p><pre>
array(
title => 'Weekly Peace Vigil',
link => 'http://protest.net/NorthEast/calendrome.cgi?span=event&ID=210257',
description => 'Wear a white ribbon',
dc => array (
subject => 'Peace'
),
ev => array (
startdate => '2002-06-01T11:00:00',
enddate => '2002-06-01T12:00:00',
type => 'Protest',
location => 'Northampton, MA'
)
);
</pre>
</p>
<p>
<h4>image and textinput</h4>
<code>$rss->image</code> and <code>$rss-textinput</code> are associative arrays
including name-value pairs for anything found between the respective parent
tags.
</p>
<p>
<a name="usage"></a>
<h3>Usage Examples:</h3>
A very simple example would be:
<pre>
require_once 'rss_fetch.inc';
$url = 'http://magpie.sf.net/samples/imc.1-0.rdf';
$rss = fetch_rss($url);
echo "Site: ", $rss->channel['title'], "<br>\n";
foreach ($rss->items as $item ) {
$title = $item[title];
$url = $item[link];
echo "<a href=$url>$title</a></li><br>\n";
}
</pre>
More soon....in the meantime you can check out a
<a href="http://www.infinitepenguins.net/rss/">cool tool built with
MagpieRSS</a>, version 0.1.
</p>
<p>
<a name="todo"></a>
<h3>Todos</h3>
<h4>RSS Parser</h4>
<ul>
<li>Swap in a smarter parser that includes optional
support for validation, and required fields.</li>
<li>Support RSS 2.0 (as much as I'm annoyed by it)</li>
<li>Improve support for modules that rely on attributes</li>
</ul>
<h4>RSS Cache</h4>
<ul>
<li>Light-weight garbage collection
</ul>
<h4>Fetch RSS</h4>
<ul>
<li>Attempt to <a
href="http://diveintomark.org/archives/2002/08/15.html">auto-detect an
RSS feed</a>, given a URL following, much like <a
href="http://diveintomark.org/projects/misc/rssfinder.py.txt">rssfinder.py</a>does.
</li>
</ul>
<h4>Misc</h4>
<ul>
<li>More examples</li>
<li>A test suite</li>
<li>RSS generation, perhaps with <a
href="http://usefulinc.com/rss/rsswriter/">RSSwriter</a>?
</li>
</ul>
</p>
<p>
<h3>RSS Resources</h3>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://mnot.net/rss/tutorial/">RSS Tutorial for Content Publishers
and Webmasters</a> is a great place to start.
<li><a href="http://gils.utah.gov/rss/">RSS Workshop: Publish and Syndicate
Your News to the Web</a> is also a good introduction</li>
<li><a href="http://www.disobey.com/amphetadesk/finding_more.html">Finding
More Channels</a> on how to find RSS feeds.
<li>Hammersley's <a href="http://rss.benhammersley.com/">Content Syndication
with XML and RSS</a> is a blog covering RSS current events.
<li><a href="http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rss-dev/">RSS-DEV mailing
list</a> is generally a very helpful, informative space, with the occasional
heated debate
<li><a href="http://feeds.archive.org/validator/">RSS Validator</a>
</ul>.
</p>
<h3>License and Contact Info</h3>
Magpie is distributed under the GPL license...
<p>
coded by: kellan (at) protest.net, feedback is always appreciated.
<p>
<a href="http://sourceforge.net"><img
src="http://sourceforge.net/sflogo.php?group_id=55691&type=3"
width="125" height="37" border="0" alt="SourceForge.net Logo"></a>
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