PHP, Convert iTunes RSS to JSON - php

Question

I am trying to utilize simplexml to convert an iTunes RSS Feed to JSON so I can better parse it. The issue I am having is that it is not coming back as correctly formatted JSON.
$feed_url = 'https://podcasts.subsplash.com/c2yjpyh/podcast.rss';
$feed_contents = file_get_contents($feed_url);
$xml = simplexml_load_string($feed_contents);
$podcasts = json_decode(json_encode($xml));
print_r($podcasts);
Is there a better way to be attempting this to get the correct result?

Answer 1

Thanks to IMSoP for pointing me in the right direction! This took a bit of studying but the solution ends up being very simple! Instead of trying to convert to a JSON format, just use SimpleXML. However, due to the namespaces, it does require an additional line to map the itunes: prefix.
So in my iTunes feed rss, the following line exists: xmlns:itunes="http://www.itunes.com/dtds/podcast-1.0.dtd So we just reference this to make accessing the values very easy. Here is a quick example:
$rss = simplexml_load_file('https://podcasts.example.com/podcast.rss');
foreach ($rss->channel->item as $item){
// Now we define the map for the itunes: namespace
$itunes = $item->children('http://www.itunes.com/dtds/podcast-1.0.dtd');
// This is a value WITHOUT the itunes: namespace
$title = $item->title;
// This is a value WITH the itunes: namespace
$author = $itunes->author;
echo $title . '<br>';
echo $author . '<br>';
}
The other little issue that I ran into is getting attributes such as the url for images and audio links. That is accomplished by using the attributes() function like so:
// Access attributes WITH itunes: namespace
$image = $itunes->image->attributes();
// Access attributes WITHOUT itunes: namespace
$audio = $item->enclosure->attributes();
// To echo these we simple add the desired attribute in `[]`:
echo $image['href'] . '<br>';
echo $audio['url'] . '<br>';