So infuriating, I can hardly talk. I've assembled an RSS feed with SimpleXML and yet - it's using name spaces, which are right now. But, it's constantly trying to declare xmlns:xmlns="" in the root node, when output. Even though I do no such thing.
It starts with
$rssXML->addAttribute("version", '2.0');
$rssXML->addAttribute("xmlns:media", "http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/", '');
$rssXML->addAttribute("xmlns:dcterms", "http://purl.org/dc/terms/", '');
and after this I do:-
header("Content-Type: application/rss+xml");
echo $syndicationXML->asXML();
Yet it outputs :-
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<rss xmlns:xmlns="" version="2.0" xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/" xmlns:dcterms="http://purl.org/dc/terms/"><channel>...
I do not understand all this namespace declaration. What's going on?
The problem with SimpleXML is that it's addAttribute function adds an attribute, not a namespace and although it seems like it does what you want, it's not meant to be used the way you are using it.
It's meant to add a value that's part of a particular namespace (specified as the third parameter), not to add the namespace itself. The reason why you end up with xmlns:xmlns is because SimpleXML found that you used the xmlns namespace when specifying the name xmlns:media for instance so it created an empty xmlns:xmlns.
Here are 2 solutions to your problem:
1. Specify in the namespaces in the constructor.
$rssXML = new SimpleXMLElement('<rss xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/" xmlns:dcterms="http://purl.org/dc/terms/" />');
$rssXML->addAttribute('version', '2.0');
2. Replace xmlns:xmlns="" using preg_replace
echo preg_replace('/xmlns:xmlns=""\s?/', '', $rssXML->asXML());