Illegal string offset 'date' - php

Question

I am trying to upgrade a friend's Wordpress site to the latest versions of Wordpress and PHP.
All is working fine except for a scrolling news ticker he uses on his homepage that errors out with "Illegal string offset 'date'", and no news is shown.
This is the script:
<?php
$xmlOption = get_option('xmlFeed');
if (!isset($xmlOption)) {
$buildURL = "https://wordpress.org/news/feed/";
$request = curl_init();
curl_setopt($request, CURLOPT_URL, $buildURL);
curl_setopt($request, CURLOPT_HEADER, false);
curl_setopt($request, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$result = curl_exec($request);
curl_close($request);
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($result);
$channel = $xml->channel;
delete_option('xmlFeed');
$otion = array(
'xml' => $channel,
'date' => date('y-m-d')
);
add_option('xmlFeed', $option);
}
if ($xmlOption['date'] == date('y-m-d')) {
$channel = $xmlOption['xml'];
} else {
$buildURL = "https://wordpress.org/news/feed/";
$request = curl_init();
curl_setopt($request, CURLOPT_URL, $buildURL);
curl_setopt($request, CURLOPT_HEADER, false);
curl_setopt($request, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$result = curl_exec($request);
curl_close($request);
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($result);
$channel = $xml->channel;
delete_option('xmlFeed');
$otion = array(
'xml' => $channel,
'date' => date('y-m-d')
);
add_option('xmlFeed', $option);
}
$i = 0;
while ($i <= 5) {
echo "<li><a href='" . $channel->item->$i->link . "' target='_blank'>" . $channel->item->$i->title . "</a></li>";
$i++;
}
?>
I noticed the use of $otion two times, which i thought was maybe a typo. But when i changed that to $option the rest of the page was not parsed, so I guess that isn't the problem.
As I am not a coder and i pulled my hairs out for 2 nights now.
Time to get some help before i have none left.
Anyone can help me with this one?

Answer 1

It is not a real answer to my question, but I found another script that, with some small changes, works perfectly. So I'm happy.
<?php
$rss = new DOMDocument();
$rss->load('http://wordpress.org/news/feed/');
$feed = array();
foreach ($rss->getElementsByTagName('item') as $node) {
$item = array (
'title' => $node->getElementsByTagName('title')->item(0)->nodeValue,
'link' => $node->getElementsByTagName('link')->item(0)->nodeValue,
);
array_push($feed, $item);
}
$limit = 5;
for($x=0;$x<$limit;$x++) {
$title = str_replace(' & ', ' & ', $feed[$x]['title']);
$link = $feed[$x]['link'];
echo '<li>'.$title.'</li>';
}
?>
It is smaller and cleaner.
Thanks for your help #Marcus