Getting media:thumbnail from XML - php

Question

I just can't seem to be able to solve this. I want to get the media:thumbnail from an RSS file (http://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/rss.xml).
I did some research and tried to incorporate insights from
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6707315/getting-xml-attribute-from-mediathumbnail-in-bbc-rss-feed
and from other sources.
This is what I got:
$source_link = "http://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/rss.xml";
$source_xml = simplexml_load_file($source_link);
$namespace = "http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/";
foreach ($source_xml->channel->item as $rss) {
$title = $rss->title;
$description = $rss->description;
$link = $rss->link;
$date_raw = $rss->pubDate;
$date = date("Y-m-j G:i:s", strtotime($date_raw));
$image = $rss->attributes($namespace);
print_r($image);
}
When I run the script, all I see is a white page. If I echo or print_r any of the other variables, then it works like a charm. It's just the $image one which poses problems. Why isn't this working? Thx for any help!

Answer 1

OK, it works now. I replaced
$image = $rss->attributes($namespace);
with
$image = $rss->children($namespace)->thumbnail[1]->attributes();
$image_link = $image['url'];
and it works like a charm now.

Answer 2

Base from this blog, with post title Processing media:thumbnail in RSS feeds with php.
The solution that I found works best simply loads the xml file as a string, then find and replace 'media:thumbnail' with a correctly formatted 'thumbnail' and lastly convert it back to xml with simplexml_load_string:
$xSource = 'http://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/rss.xml';
$xsourcefile = file_get_contents( $xSource );
$xsourcefile = str_replace("media:thumbnail","thumbnail",$xsourcefile);
$xml = simplexml_load_string( $xsourcefile );
echo $row['xtitle'] . '<BR>';
foreach ($xml->channel->item as $item) {
echo ':' . $item->title . '<BR>';
echo ':' . $item->thumbnail['url'] . '<BR>';
}

Answer 3

$image = $rss->attributes($namespace);
This says "Give me all attributes of this <item> element which are in the media namespace". There are no attributes on the item element (much less any in the media namespace), so this returns nothing.
You want this:
$firstimage = $rss->children($namespace)->thumbnail[0];
BTW, when you use SimpleXML you need to be careful to cast your SimpleXMLElements to string when you need the text value of the element. Something like $rss->title is a SimpleXMLElement, not a string.