PHP and XML parsing - php

Question

I'm struggling to parse an XML file in PHP:
Here's the XML
<rss xmlns:ac="http://palm.com/app.catalog.rss.extensions" version="2.0">
<channel>
<title>Device App Updates for US</title>
<link>http://www.palm.com</link>
<description>Updates</description>
<language>en-US</language>
<pubDate>Mon, 04 Jan 2010 18:23:51 -0800</pubDate>
<lastBuildDate>Mon, 04 Jan 2010 18:23:51 -0800</lastBuildDate>
<ac:distributionChannel>Device</ac:distributionChannel>
<ac:countryCode>US</ac:countryCode>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[My App]]></title>
<link>http://developer.palm.com/appredirect/?packageid=com.palm.myapp</link>
<description><![CDATA[My fun app.]]></description>
<pubDate>2009-12-21 21:00:58</pubDate>
<guid>334.232</guid>
<ac:total_downloads>1234</ac:total_downloads>
<ac:total_comments>12</ac:total_comments>
<ac:country>US</ac:country>
</item>
</channel>
</rss>
My Problem is; when I use:
$strURL = "http://developer.palm.com/rss/D/appcatalog.update.rss.xml";
$ch = curl_init($strURL);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
$data = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
$doc = new SimpleXmlElement($data, LIBXML_NOCDATA);
print_r($doc);
I'm not able to display the values? The one I'm most interested in is <ac:total_downloads>1000</ac> but I don't seem to be able to parse it.
What am I doing wrong?
Many thanks

Answer 1

You don't need to use curl to retrieve that file, SimpleXML can fetch external resources.
Use children() to access namespaced nodes. Here's how to do it:
$rss = simplexml_load_file($strURL);
$ns = 'http://palm.com/app.catalog.rss.extensions';
foreach ($rss->channel->item as $item)
{
echo 'Title: ', $item->title, "\n";
echo 'Downloads: ', $item->children($ns)->total_downloads, "\n\n";
}