Accessing URL within Twitter XML Tag - php

Question

I'am currently parsing in a twitter tweets by geocode and displaying them using php. But at the moment unable to access the URL to the tweet and have instead opted to show the users twitter profile.
The URL I'm trying to access is within the link tag
<link type="text/html" href="http://twitter.com/pmhigham/statuses/166271863331368961" rel="alternate" >
Its location within the XML file is Feed->Entry->Link.
I have thought about using a regular expression but don't know how to go about using this.
Here is my code.
<h3><?php
if (isset($column1Heading)) {
echo $column1Heading;
}
?></h3>
<p>
<strong>Tweets within 10 miles radius of London Eye</strong></br>
<?php
$feed = simplexml_load_file ('http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?geocode=51.5069999695%2C-0.142489999533%2C10.0mi%22london%22&lang=en&rpp=5');
if ($feed){foreach ($feed->entry as $item) {
echo '<a href=\'' . $item->author->uri. '\'>' . $item->title . '</a>', '</br>' . $item->published, '</br>';
}
}
else echo "Cannot find Twitter feed!"
?>
</br>
<strong>London Hashtag</strong>
</br>
<?php
$feed = simplexml_load_file ('http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=%23london&lang=en&rpp=5');
if ($feed){foreach ($feed->entry as $item) {
echo '<a href=\'' . $item->author->uri. '\'>' . $item->title . '</a>', '</br>' . $item->published, '</br>';
}
}
else echo "Cannot find Twitter feed!"
?>
</p>
</li>
<li class="col2">
<h3><?php
if (isset($column2Heading)) {
echo $column2Heading;
}
?></h3>
<p>
<?php
$feed = simplexml_load_file ('http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?geocode=40.744544%2C-74.027593%2C10.0mi%22manhattan%2C+ny%22&lang=en&rpp=5');
if ($feed){foreach ($feed->entry as $item) {
echo '<a href=\'' . $item->author->uri. '\'>' . $item->title . '</a>', '</br>' . $item->published, '</br>';
}
}
else echo "Cannot find Twitter feed!"
?>
<strong>NYC Hashtag</strong>
</br>
<?php
$feed = simplexml_load_file ('http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=%23nyc&lang=en&rpp=5');
if ($feed){foreach ($feed->entry as $item) {
echo '<a href=\'' . $item->author->uri. '\'>' . $item->title . '</a>', '</br>' . $item->published, '</br>';
}
}
else echo "Cannot find Twitter feed!"
?>
</p>
</li>
<li class="col3">
<h3><?php
if (isset($column3Heading)) {
echo $column3Heading;
}
?></h3>
<p>
<?php
$feed = simplexml_load_file ('http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?lang=en&geocode=48.861%2C2.336%2C5.0mi%22paris%2C+fr%22&rpp=5&lang=en');
if ($feed){foreach ($feed->entry as $item) {
echo '<a href=\'' . $item->author->uri. '\'>' . $item->title . '</a>', '</br>' . $item->published, '</br>';
}
}
else echo "Cannot find Twitter feed!"
?>
</p>
</li>
</ul>
<div class="clear"></div>
</div>
<?php require_once 'footer.php'; ?>

Answer 1

If I understand you correctly:
You can access the attribute with the built in attributes() method of SimpleXML.
$item->link->attributes()->href
Otherwise the regular expression should look like this
$string = '<link type="text/html" href="http://twitter.com/pmhigham/statuses/166271863331368961" rel="alternate" >';
preg_match('/href\=\"([^\"]+)\"/i', $string, $matches);