How to retrieve an attribute from a namespaced element

Question

I am trying to get the url attributes from the <media:content> elements in this RSS feed:

https://news.google.com/rss/search?q=test&as_qdr=w1&scoring=n&num=100&hl=en-CA&gl=CA&ceid=CA:en

Here's what I have so far:

$feed_url = "https://news.google.com/rss/search?q=test&as_qdr=w1&scoring=n&num=100&hl=en-CA&gl=CA&ceid=CA:en";

$rss = file_get_contents($feed_url);
$rss = new SimpleXMLElement($rss);
$items = $rss->channel->item; 
  
foreach ($items as $item) {
    print_r($item);
    echo "<hr>";
}

This code works for all elements except the ones with a semicolon in the name, like <media:content> or <dc:contributor>. If I open the XML feed in my browser I can see the tag I am looking for:

<media:content url="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/proxy/nxX8kqpFKSDvYg_bf_QrdsS0PYNMFPGspYmTlZlIo0IzyyhYhURxQc5nrpnzfrNBZkWQywioGXdPclazSIEwiz5wklsBePHOCft9qdHl2EmqIES_SMl5orim2xM2eHYalvIgFFeGYvp7cQaCQpKAObhPGQ--diqZg4Io3MSW8f6PXlRAbUcPvpDxB-KRqBj53bbROhoUYuqxkA=-w150-h150-c" medium="image" width="150" height="150"/>
</item>

I tried various solutions from other threads but it didn't work for me. Example:

$xml_object = $rss->channel->item[0];
$ns_media = $xml_object->children('http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/');

I don't know what I'm doing wrong so I would appreciate some help

Answer 1

You're missing a call to the attributes() method of your SimpleXMLElement instance:

foreach ($items as $item) {
  $media_content_url = $item->children('http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/')->attributes()->url;
  // ...
}