Trying to Parse Images and Text from an RSS Feed - php

Question

This is a continuation of the thread here: Trying to Parse Only the Images from an RSS Feed
This time I want to parse both Images and Certain Items from an RSS feed. A Sampling of the RSS feed looks like this:
<channel>
<atom:link href="http://mywebsite.com/rss" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
<item>
<title>Article One</title>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://mywebsite.com/details/e8c5106</guid>
<link>http://mywebsite.com/geturl/e8c5106</link>
<comments>http://mywebsite.com/details/e8c5106#comments</comments>
<pubDate>Wed, 09 Jan 2013 02:59:45 -0500</pubDate>
<category>Category 1</category>
<description>
<![CDATA[<div>
<img src="http://mywebsite.com/myimages/1521197-main.jpg" width="120" border="0" />
<ul><li>Poster: someone's name;</li>
<li>PostDate: Tue, 08 Jan 2013 21:49:35 -0500</li>
<li>Rating: 5</li>
<li>Summary:Lorem ipsum dolor </li></ul></div><div style="clear:both;">]]>
</description>
</item>
<item>..
I have the following code below where I try to parse image and text:
$xml = simplexml_load_file('http://mywebsite.com/rss?t=2040&dl=1&i=1');
$descriptions = $xml->xpath('//item/description');
$mytitle= $xml->xpath('//item/title');
foreach ( $descriptions as $description_node ) {
// The description may not be valid XML, so use a more forgiving HTML parser mode
$description_dom = new DOMDocument();
$description_dom->loadHTML( (string)$description_node );
// Switch back to SimpleXML for readability
$description_sxml = simplexml_import_dom( $description_dom );
// Find all images, and extract their 'src' param
$imgs = $description_sxml->xpath('//img');
foreach($imgs as $image) {
echo "<img id=poster class=poster src={$image['src']}> {$mytitle}";
}
}
The above code extracts the images beautifully.... However, it does not extract the $mytitle (which would be "Article One") tag as I try on the last line of my code. This is supposed to extract from all items in the RSS feed.
Can anyone help me figure this one out please.
Many thanks,
Hernando

Answer 1

xpath() always returns an array (see http://www.php.net/manual/en/simplexmlelement.xpath.php), even if just one element is the result. If you know you will expect one element, you can simply use $mytitle[0].
You will have to iterate over each <item/> element, as otherwise you can't know which description and which title belong together. So the following should work:
$xml = simplexml_load_file('test.xml');
$items = $xml->xpath('//item');
foreach ( $items as $item) {
$descriptions = $item->description;
$mytitle = $item->title;
foreach ( $descriptions as $description_node ) {
// The description may not be valid XML, so use a more forgiving HTML parser mode
$description_dom = new DOMDocument();
$description_dom->loadHTML( (string)$description_node );
// Switch back to SimpleXML for readability
$description_sxml = simplexml_import_dom( $description_dom );
// Find all images, and extract their 'src' param
$imgs = $description_sxml->xpath('//img');
foreach($imgs as $image) {
echo "<img id=\"poster\" class=\"poster\" src=\"{$image['src']}\"> {$mytitle}";
}
}
}
By the way, I also added "" to you your <img/> element. I guess you want that, as this look very much like XML/HTML.