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<html><head><title>Magpie RSS - PHP RSS Parser</title><link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS"href="http://laughingmeme.org/magpierss.rdf" /><style>body {font-family:trebuchet MS, trebuchet, verdana, arial, sans-serif;font-size: 11px;}pre { font-family: "Courier New", monospace;padding: 1em;margin: 0.2em 2.5em 0.2em 3em;background-color: #efeff5;border: 1px solid #cfcfcf;white-space: pre;}li.news {padding-bottom:15px;}a.nav { color: #FFFFFF; }div.nav {width: 2in;float: right;border: 2px solid #cfcfcf;padding: 5px;background-color: #996699;}</style></head><body><img src="magpie-photo.jpg"><h1>MagpieRSS</h1><p><h2>MagpieRSS provides an XML-based (expat) RSS parser in PHP.</h2><p>MagpieRSS is compatible with RSS .9 through RSS 1.0, and supports theRSS 1.0's modules. (with a few exceptions)<p><div class="nav"><center><h3>Project Info</h3></center><ul><li><a class="nav"href="http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=55691">DownloadMagpie</a></li><li><a class="nav"href="http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=55691">MailingLists</a></li><li><a class="nav" href="#news">News!</a></li><li><a class="nav" href="#why">Why?</a></li><li><a class="nav" href="#features">Features</a></li><li><a class="nav" href="#philosophy">Philosophy</a></li><li><a class="nav" href="#usage">Usage Examples</a></li><li><a class="nav" href="/cookbook.html">Cookbook</a></li><li><a class="nav" href="#todo">Todo</a></li><li style="list-style: none; padding-top: 5px;"><a title="Keep up on MagpieRSS news via RSS" href="http://laughingmeme.org/magpierss.rdf"><imgsrc="http://magpierss.sf.net/black_grey_magpie_news.gif" border="0"></a></li></ul></div><a name="news"></a><h3>News!</h3><ul><li class="news"><ahref="http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=55691">MagpieRSS0.51 Released</a><ul><li> important bugfix!</li><li> fix <a href="http://laughingmeme.org/archives/000811.html">"silent failure"</a> when PHP doesn't have zlib</li></ul></li><li class="news"><a href="http://minutillo.com/steve/feedonfeeds/">Feed On Feeds Uses Magpie</a><ul><li> server based PHP RSS aggregator built with MagpieRSS</li><li> easy to install, easy to use.</li></ul></li><li class="news"><ahref="http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=55691&release_id=158897">MagpieRSS0.5 Released</a><ul><li> supports transparent HTTP gzip content negotiation for reduced bandwidth usage</li><li> quashed some undefined index notices</li></ul></li><li class="news"><ahref="http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=55691&release_id=139643">MagpieRSS0.46 Released</a><ul><li> minor release, more error handling clean up</li><li> documentation fixes, simpler example</li><li> new <a href="/TROUBLESHOOTING">trouble shooting</a> guide for installation and usage problems</a></ul></li><li class="news"><ahref="http://laughingmeme.org/magpierss.rdf">Magpie News as RSS</a><ul><li> releases, bug fixes, releated stories as an RSS feed</li></ul></li><li class="news"><ahref="http://magpierss.sourceforge.net/cookbook.html">MagpieRSSCookbook: Simple PHP RSS How Tos</a><ul><li> answers some of the most frequently asked Magpie questions</li><li> feedback, suggestions, requests, recipes welcome</li></ul></li><li clas="news"><a href="http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=55691&release_id=134850">MagpieRSS 0.4 Released!</a><ul><li> improved error handling, more flexibility for script authors,backwards compatible</li><li> new and better examples! including using MagpieRSS and <ahref="http://smarty.php.net">Smarty</a></li><li> new Smarty plugin for RSS date parsing</li></ul><br /></li><!--<li class="news"><a href="http://www.infinitepenguins.net/rss/">Infinite Penguin nowsupports Magpie 0.3</a><ul><li> simple, sophisticated RSS viewer</li><li> includes auto-generated javascript ticker from RSS feed</li></ul></li><li class="news"><ahref="http://traumwind.tierpfad.de/blog/magpie/magpie_alike.php">Traumwindreleases REX backend for MagpieRSS</a><ul><li>drop in support using regex based XML parser</li><li>parses improperly formed XML that chokes expat</li></ul></li><li class="news"><ahref="http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=55691&release_id=118652">MagpieRSS 0.3 Released!</a><ul><li>Support added for<a href="http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/archives/001132.html">HTTPConditional GETs</a>.</li><li>See <a href="http://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?group_id=55691&release_id=118652">ChangeLog</a>for more info.</li></ul></li><li class="news">MagpieRSS 0.2!</a><ul><li>Major clean up of the code. Easier to use.</li><li>Simpler install on shared hosts.</li><li>Better documentation and comments.</li></ul></li><li class="news">We've <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/magpierss/">moved toSourceforge!</a></li>--></ul></p><p><a name="why"></a><h3>Why?</h3>I wrote MagpieRSS out of a frustration with the limitations of existingsolutions. In particular many of the existing PHP solutions seemed to:<ul><li>use a parser based on regular expressions, making for an inherentlyfragile solution<li>only support early versions of RSS<li>discard all the interesting information besides item title, description,and link.<li>not build proper separation between parsing the RSS and displaying it.</ul>In particular I failed to find any PHP RSS parsers that could sufficientlyparse RSS 1.0 feeds, to be useful on the RSS based event feeds we generateat <a href="http://protest.net">Protest.net</a>.</p><p><a name="features"></a><h3>Features</h3><ul><li class="toplevel"><h4>Easy to Use</h4>As simple as:<pre>require('rss_fetch.inc');$rss = fetch_rss($url);</pre></li><li class="toplevel"><h4>Parses RSS 0.9 - RSS 1.0</h4>Parses most RSS formats, including support for<a href="http://www.purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/">1.0 modules</a> and limitednamespace support. RSS is packed into convenient data structures; easy touse in PHP, and appropriate for passing to a templating system, like<a href="http://smarty.php.net">Smarty</a>.</li><li><h4>Integrated Object Cache</h4>Caching the parsed RSS means that the 2nd request is fast, and thatincluding the rss_fetch call in your PHP page won't destroy your performance,and force you to reply on an external cron job. And it happens transparently.</li><li><h4>HTTP Conditional GETs</h4>Save bandwidth and speed up download times with intelligent use ofLast-Modified and ETag.<br /> See <ahref="http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/archives/001132.html">HTTP Conditional Get for RSS Hackers</a></li><li><h4>Configurable</h4>Makes extensive use of constants to allow overriding default behaviour, andinstallation on shared hosts.</li><li><h4>Modular</h4><ul><li>rss_fetch.inc - wraps a simple interface (<code>fetch_rss()</code>)around the library.<li>rss_parse.inc - provides the RSS parser, and the RSS object<li>rss_cache.inc - a simple (no GC) object cache, optimized for RSS objects<li>rss_utils.inc - utility functions for working with RSS. currentlyprovides <code>parse_w3cdtf()</code>, for parsing <ahref="http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime">W3CDTF</a> into epoch seconds.</ul></ul></p><p><a name="philosophy"></a><h3>Magpie's approach to parsing RSS</h3>Magpie takes a naive, and inclusive approach. Absolutelynon-validating, as long as the RSS feed is well formed, Magpie willcheerfully parse new, and never before seen tags in your RSS feeds.</p><p>This makes it very simple support the varied versions of RSS simply, butforces the consumer of a RSS feed to be cognizant of how it isstructured.(at least if you want to do something fancy)</p><p>Magpie parses a RSS feed into a simple object, with 4 fields:<code>channel</code>, <code>items</code>, <code>image</code>, and<code>textinput</code>.</p><p><h4>channel</h4><code>$rss->channel</code> contains key-value pairs of all tags, withoutnested tags, found between the root tag (<rdf:RDF>, or <rss>)and the end of the document.</p><p><h4>items</h4><code>$rss->items</code> is an array of associative arrays, each onedescribing a single item. An example that looks like:<pre><item rdf:about="http://protest.net/NorthEast/calendrome.cgi?span=event&ID=210257"><title>Weekly Peace Vigil</title><link>http://protest.net/NorthEast/calendrome.cgi?span=event&ID=210257</link><description>Wear a white ribbon</description><dc:subject>Peace</dc:subject><ev:startdate>2002-06-01T11:00:00</ev:startdate><ev:location>Northampton, MA</ev:location><ev:enddate>2002-06-01T12:00:00</ev:enddate><ev:type>Protest</ev:type></item></pre><p>Is parsed, and pushed on the <code>$rss->items</code> array as:<p><pre>array(title => 'Weekly Peace Vigil',link => 'http://protest.net/NorthEast/calendrome.cgi?span=event&ID=210257',description => 'Wear a white ribbon',dc => array (subject => 'Peace'),ev => array (startdate => '2002-06-01T11:00:00',enddate => '2002-06-01T12:00:00',type => 'Protest',location => 'Northampton, MA'));</pre></p><p><h4>image and textinput</h4><code>$rss->image</code> and <code>$rss-textinput</code> are associative arraysincluding name-value pairs for anything found between the respective parenttags.</p><p><a name="usage"></a><h3>Usage Examples:</h3>A very simple example would be:<pre>require_once 'rss_fetch.inc';$url = 'http://magpie.sf.net/samples/imc.1-0.rdf';$rss = fetch_rss($url);echo "Site: ", $rss->channel['title'], "<br>\n";foreach ($rss->items as $item ) {$title = $item[title];$url = $item[link];echo "<a href=$url>$title</a></li><br>\n";}</pre>More soon....in the meantime you can check out a<a href="http://www.infinitepenguins.net/rss/">cool tool built withMagpieRSS</a>, version 0.1.</p><p><a name="todo"></a><h3>Todos</h3><h4>RSS Parser</h4><ul><li>Swap in a smarter parser that includes optionalsupport for validation, and required fields.</li><li>Support RSS 2.0 (as much as I'm annoyed by it)</li><li>Improve support for modules that rely on attributes</li></ul><h4>RSS Cache</h4><ul><li>Light-weight garbage collection</ul><h4>Fetch RSS</h4><ul><li>Attempt to <ahref="http://diveintomark.org/archives/2002/08/15.html">auto-detect anRSS feed</a>, given a URL following, much like <ahref="http://diveintomark.org/projects/misc/rssfinder.py.txt">rssfinder.py</a>does.</li></ul><h4>Misc</h4><ul><li>More examples</li><li>A test suite</li><li>RSS generation, perhaps with <ahref="http://usefulinc.com/rss/rsswriter/">RSSwriter</a>?</li></ul></p><p><h3>RSS Resources</h3><ul><li><a href="http://mnot.net/rss/tutorial/">RSS Tutorial for Content Publishersand Webmasters</a> is a great place to start.<li><a href="http://gils.utah.gov/rss/">RSS Workshop: Publish and SyndicateYour News to the Web</a> is also a good introduction</li><li><a href="http://www.disobey.com/amphetadesk/finding_more.html">FindingMore Channels</a> on how to find RSS feeds.<li>Hammersley's <a href="http://rss.benhammersley.com/">Content Syndicationwith XML and RSS</a> is a blog covering RSS current events.<li><a href="http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rss-dev/">RSS-DEV mailinglist</a> is generally a very helpful, informative space, with the occasionalheated debate<li><a href="http://feeds.archive.org/validator/">RSS Validator</a></ul>.</p><h3>License and Contact Info</h3>Magpie is distributed under the GPL license...<p>coded by: kellan (at) protest.net, feedback is always appreciated.<p><a href="http://sourceforge.net"><imgsrc="http://sourceforge.net/sflogo.php?group_id=55691&type=3"width="125" height="37" border="0" alt="SourceForge.net Logo"></a><img src="http://laughingmeme.org/magpie_views.gif"></body></html>