Using SimpleXML to read RSS feed

Question

I am using PHP and simpleXML to read the following rss feed:

http://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/england/rss.xml

I can get most of the information I want like so:

$rss = simplexml_load_file('http://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/england/rss.xml');

echo '<h1>'. $rss->channel->title . '</h1>';

foreach ($rss->channel->item as $item) {
   echo '<h2><a href="'. $item->link .'">' . $item->title . "</a></h2>";
   echo "<p>" . $item->pubDate . "</p>";
   echo "<p>" . $item->description . "</p>";
} 

But how would I output the thumbnail image that is in the following tag:

<media:thumbnail width="66" height="49" url="http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/51078000/jpg/_51078953_226alanpotbury.jpg"/>  

Answer 1

SimpleXML is pretty bad at handling namespaces. You have two choices: The simplest hack is to simply read the contents of the feed into a string and replace the namespaces;

$feed = file_get_contents('http://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/england/rss.xml');
$feed = str_replace('<media:', '<', $feed);

$rss = simplexml_load_string($feed);
...

Now you can access the element thumbnail directly.

The more elegant (not really) method is to find out what URI the namespace uses. If you look at the source code for http://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/england/rss.xml you see that it points to http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/.

Now you can use this URI in the children() method of a SimpleXMLElement to get the contents of the media:thumbnail element;

$rss = simplexml_load_file('http://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/england/rss.xml');

foreach ($rss->channel->item as $item) {
    $media = $item->children('http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/');
    ...
}