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phprssrandomparsingfeed

Randomize external RSS feed order in PHP

I'm using a third-party AJAX slideshow for a website that takes an RSS feed as its picture source. I would like to randomize the order of the pictures, but that's not a feature of the slideshow (or the RSS feed I'm pulling from).

Surely it shouldn't be difficult to write a short function in PHP that takes an external RSS feed, randomizes the items and re-publishes the same feed 'out of order'. I just can't seem to make it work.

Solution

  • Are you using DOM XML? Then just shuffle the array on import.

    $xml = new DOMDocument();
$articles = $xml->getElementsByTagName("article");
$data = array();
foreach ($articles as $article) {
    data[] = ...
}
shuffle($data);