Parsing Google News RSS with PHP

Question

I want to parse Google News rss with PHP. I managed to run this code:

Answer 1

I'd recommend checking out SimplePie. I've used it for several different projects and it works great (and abstracts away all of the headache you're currently dealing with).

Now, if you're writing this code simply because you want to learn how to do it, you should probably ignore this answer. :)

Answer 2

There we go, just what you need for your particular situation:

<?php
$news = simplexml_load_file('http://news.google.com/news?pz=1&cf=all&ned=us&hl=en&topic=n&output=rss');

$feeds = array();

$i = 0;

foreach ($news->channel->item as $item) 
{
    preg_match('@src="([^"]+)"@', $item->description, $match);
    $parts = explode('<font size="-1">', $item->description);

    $feeds[$i]['title'] = (string) $item->title;
    $feeds[$i]['link'] = (string) $item->link;
    $feeds[$i]['image'] = $match[1];
    $feeds[$i]['site_title'] = strip_tags($parts[1]);
    $feeds[$i]['story'] = strip_tags($parts[2]);

    $i++;
}

echo '<pre>';
print_r($feeds);
echo '</pre>';
?>

And the output should look like this:

[2] => Array
        (
            [title] => Los Alamos Nuclear Lab Under Siege From Wildfire - ABC News
            [link] => http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&usg=AFQjCNGxBe4YsZArH0kSwEjq_zDm_h-N4A&url=http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id%3D13951623
            [image] => http://nt2.ggpht.com/news/tbn/OhH43xORRwiW1M/6.jpg
            [site_title] => ABC News
            [story] => A wildfire burning near the desert birthplace of the atomic bomb advanced on the Los Alamos laboratory and thousands of outdoor drums of plutonium-contaminated waste Tuesday as authorities stepped up ...
        )

Answer 3

1. To get the URL for a news item, use $item->link.
2. If there's a common delimiter for the related news links, you could use regex to cut off everything after it.
3. Google puts the thumbnail image HTML code inside the description field of the feed. You could regex out everything between the open and close brackets for the image declaration to get the HTML for it.