topical media & game development
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mashup-delicious-06-example6-7-magpierss-htdocs-index.htm / htm



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    <head>
    <title>Magpie RSS - PHP RSS Parser</title>
    <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS"
          href="http://laughingmeme.org/magpierss.rdf" />
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    <body>
            <img src="magpie-photo.jpg">
          <h1>MagpieRSS</h1>
          <p>
          <h2>MagpieRSS provides an XML-based (expat) RSS parser in PHP.</h2>
          <p>
          MagpieRSS is compatible with RSS .9 through RSS 1.0, and supports the
          RSS 1.0's modules. (with a few exceptions)
          <p>
          <div class="nav">
          <center><h3>Project Info</h3></center>
          <ul>
          <li><a class="nav"
  href="http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=55691">Download
  Magpie</a></li>
          <li><a class="nav"
  href="http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=55691">Mailing
  Lists</a></li>
          <li><a class="nav" href="#news">News!</a></li>
          <li><a class="nav" href="#why">Why?</a></li>
          <li><a class="nav" href="#features">Features</a></li>
          <li><a class="nav" href="#philosophy">Philosophy</a></li>
          <li><a class="nav" href="#usage">Usage Examples</a></li>
          <li><a class="nav" href="/cookbook.html">Cookbook</a></li>
          <li><a class="nav" href="#todo">Todo</a></li>
  <li style="list-style: none; padding-top: 5px;"><a title="Keep up on MagpieRSS news via RSS" href="http://laughingmeme.org/magpierss.rdf"><img
  src="http://magpierss.sf.net/black_grey_magpie_news.gif" border="0"></a></li>
  </ul>
  </div>
          <a name="news"></a>
          <h3>News!</h3>
          <ul>
  
  <li class="news">
                  <a 
  href="http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=55691">MagpieRSS
  0.51 Released</a>
  <ul>
  <li> important bugfix!</li>
  <li> fix <a href="http://laughingmeme.org/archives/000811.html
  ">"silent failure"</a> when PHP doesn't have zlib</li>
  </ul>
  
  </li>
  
  <li class="news">
                  <a href="http://minutillo.com/steve/feedonfeeds/">Feed On Feeds Uses Magpie</a>
  <ul>
  <li> server based PHP RSS aggregator built with MagpieRSS</li>
  <li> easy to install, easy to use.</li>
  </ul>
  
  </li>
  
  <li class="news">
                  <a 
  href="http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=55691&release_id=158897">MagpieRSS
  0.5 Released</a>
  <ul>
  <li> supports transparent HTTP gzip content negotiation for reduced bandwidth usage</li> 
  <li> quashed some undefined index notices</li>
  </ul>
  
  </li>
  
  <li class="news">
                  <a 
  href="http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=55691&release_id=139643">MagpieRSS
  0.46 Released</a>
  <ul>
  <li> minor release, more error handling clean up</li> 
  <li> documentation fixes, simpler example</li>
  <li> new <a href="/TROUBLESHOOTING">trouble shooting</a> guide for installation and usage problems</a>
  </ul>
  
  </li>
  
  <li class="news">
                  <a 
  href="http://laughingmeme.org/magpierss.rdf">Magpie News as RSS</a>
  <ul>
  <li> releases, bug fixes, releated stories as an RSS feed</li> 
  </ul>
  
  </li>
  
  <li class="news">
                  <a 
  href="http://magpierss.sourceforge.net/cookbook.html">MagpieRSS
  Cookbook: Simple PHP RSS How Tos</a>
  <ul>
  <li> answers some of the most frequently asked Magpie questions</li> 
  <li> feedback, suggestions, requests, recipes welcome</li>
  </ul>
  
  </li>
  
  <li clas="news">
   <a href="http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=55691&release_id=134850">MagpieRSS 0.4 Released!</a>
  <ul>
  <li> improved error handling, more flexibility for script authors,
  backwards compatible</li>
  <li> new and better examples!  including using MagpieRSS and <a
  href="http://smarty.php.net">Smarty</a></li>
  <li> new Smarty plugin for RSS date parsing</li>
  </ul>
  <br />
  </li>
  <!--
  <li class="news">
  <a href="http://www.infinitepenguins.net/rss/">Infinite Penguin now
  supports Magpie 0.3</a>
  <ul>
  <li> simple, sophisticated RSS viewer</li> 
  <li> includes auto-generated javascript ticker from RSS feed</li>
  </ul>
  
  </li>
  
  <li class="news">
  <a
  href="http://traumwind.tierpfad.de/blog/magpie/magpie_alike.php">Traumwind
  releases REX backend for MagpieRSS</a>
  <ul>
  <li>drop in support using regex based XML parser</li>
  <li>parses improperly formed XML that chokes expat</li>
  </ul>
  
  </li>
  
  <li class="news">
                  <a
  href="http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=55691&release_id=118652">
                  MagpieRSS 0.3 Released!</a>
                  <ul>
                    <li>Support added for 
                           <a href="http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/archives/001132.html">HTTP
                           Conditional GETs</a>.</li>
                    <li>See <a href="http://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?group_id=55691&release_id=118652">ChangeLog</a>
                    for more info.</li>
              </ul>
                  </li>
                  <li class="news">MagpieRSS 0.2!</a>
                  <ul>
                    <li>Major clean up of the code.  Easier to use.</li>
                    <li>Simpler install on shared hosts.</li>
                <li>Better documentation and comments.</li>
                  </ul>
                  </li>
                  <li class="news">We've <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/magpierss/">moved to
                  Sourceforge!</a></li>
          -->
          </ul>
          </p>
          <p>
          <a name="why"></a>
          <h3>Why?</h3>
          I wrote MagpieRSS out of a frustration with the limitations of existing
          solutions.   In particular many of the existing PHP solutions seemed to:
          <ul>
          <li>use a parser based on regular expressions, making for an inherently
          fragile solution
          <li>only support early versions of RSS
          <li>discard all the interesting information besides item title, description,
          and link.
          <li>not build proper separation between parsing the RSS and displaying it.
          </ul>
          In particular I failed to find any PHP RSS parsers that could sufficiently
          parse RSS 1.0 feeds, to be useful on the RSS based event feeds we generate
          at <a href="http://protest.net">Protest.net</a>.
          </p>
          <p>
          <a name="features"></a>
          <h3>Features</h3>
  
  <ul>
          <li class="toplevel">
          <h4>Easy to Use</h4>
          As simple as:
  <pre>
  require('rss_fetch.inc');
  rss = fetch_rss(url);
  </pre>
  
          </li>
          <li class="toplevel">
                  <h4>Parses RSS 0.9 - RSS 1.0</h4>
  
                  Parses most RSS formats, including support for 
                  <a href="http://www.purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/">1.0 modules</a> and limited
                  namespace support.  RSS is packed into convenient data structures; easy to
                  use in PHP, and appropriate for passing to a templating system, like 
                  <a href="http://smarty.php.net">Smarty</a>.
          </li>
          <li>
          <h4>Integrated Object Cache</h4>
          
          Caching the parsed RSS means that the 2nd request is fast, and that
  including the rss_fetch call in your PHP page won't destroy your performance,
  and force you to reply on an external cron job. And it happens transparently.
  
          </li>
          <li>
          <h4>HTTP Conditional GETs</h4>
          
          Save bandwidth and speed up download times with intelligent use of
          Last-Modified and ETag.<br /> See <a
          href="http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/archives/001132.html">HTTP Conditional Get for RSS Hackers</a>
          </li>
          
          <li><h4>Configurable</h4>
          
          Makes extensive use of constants to allow overriding default behaviour, and
          installation on shared hosts.
          </li>
          <li><h4>Modular</h4>
          <ul>
                  <li>rss_fetch.inc - wraps a simple interface (fetch_rss())
                  around the library.
                  <li>rss_parse.inc - provides the RSS parser, and the RSS object
                  <li>rss_cache.inc - a simple (no GC) object cache, optimized for RSS objects
                  <li>rss_utils.inc - utility functions for working with RSS.  currently
                  provides <code>parse_w3cdtf()</code>, for parsing <a
                  href="http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime">W3CDTF</a> into epoch seconds.
          </ul>
  </ul>
  
          
          </p>
  <p>
          <a name="philosophy"></a>
          <h3>Magpie's approach to parsing RSS</h3>
  
          Magpie takes a naive, and inclusive approach. Absolutely
          non-validating, as long as the RSS feed is well formed, Magpie will
          cheerfully parse new, and never before seen tags in your RSS feeds.
          </p>
          <p>
          This makes it very simple support the varied versions of RSS simply, but
          forces the consumer of a RSS feed to be cognizant of how it is
          structured.(at least if you want to do something fancy)
          </p>
          <p>
          Magpie parses a RSS feed into a simple object, with 4 fields:
          <code>channel</code>, <code>items</code>, <code>image</code>, and
          <code>textinput</code>.
          </p>        
          <p>
          <h4>channel</h4>
          <code>rss->channel</code> contains key-value pairs of all tags, without
          nested tags, found between the root tag (&lt;rdf:RDF&gt;, or &lt;rss&gt;) 
          and the end of the document.
          </p>
          <p>
          <h4>items</h4>
          <code>rss->items</code> is an array of associative arrays, each one
          describing a single item.  An example that looks like:
          <pre>
  &lt;item rdf:about="http://protest.net/NorthEast/calendrome.cgi?span=event&ID=210257"&gt;
  &lt;title&gt;Weekly Peace Vigil&lt;/title&gt;
  &lt;link&gt;http://protest.net/NorthEast/calendrome.cgi?span=event&ID=210257</link>
  <description>Wear a white ribbon&lt;/description&gt;
  &lt;dc:subject&gt;Peace&lt;/dc:subject&gt;
  &lt;ev:startdate&gt;2002-06-01T11:00:00&lt;/ev:startdate&gt;
  &lt;ev:location&gt;Northampton, MA&lt;/ev:location&gt;
  &lt;ev:enddate&gt;2002-06-01T12:00:00&lt;/ev:enddate&gt;
  &lt;ev:type&gt;Protest&lt;/ev:type&gt;
  &lt;/item&gt;
          </pre><p>
          Is parsed, and pushed on the <code>rss-&gt;items</code> array as:
          <p><pre>
  array(
          title =&gt; 'Weekly Peace Vigil',
          link =&gt; 'http://protest.net/NorthEast/calendrome.cgi?span=event&ID=210257',
  	description =&gt; 'Wear a white ribbon',
          dc =&gt; array (
                          subject =&gt; 'Peace'
                  ),
          ev =&gt; array (
                  startdate =&gt; '2002-06-01T11:00:00',
                  enddate =&gt; '2002-06-01T12:00:00',
                  type =&gt; 'Protest',
                  location =&gt; 'Northampton, MA'
          )
  );
  </pre>
  </p>
  <p>
  <h4>image and textinput</h4>
  <code>rss->image</code> and <code>rss-textinput</code> are associative arrays
  including name-value pairs for anything found between the respective parent
  tags.
  </p>
  <p>
  <a name="usage"></a>
  <h3>Usage Examples:</h3>
  
  A very simple example would be:
  <pre>
  require_once 'rss_fetch.inc';
  
  url = 'http://magpie.sf.net/samples/imc.1-0.rdf';
  rss = fetch_rss(url);
  
  echo "Site: ", rss->channel['title'], "&lt;br&gt;\n";
  foreach (rss->items as item ) {
          title = item[title];
          url   = item[link];
          echo "&lt;a href=url&gt;title&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;br&gt;\n";
  }
  </pre>
  More soon....in the meantime you can check out a 
  <a href="http://www.infinitepenguins.net/rss/">cool tool built with
  MagpieRSS</a>, version 0.1.
  </p>
  <p>
  <a name="todo"></a>
  <h3>Todos</h3>
          <h4>RSS Parser</h4>
          <ul>
                  <li>Swap in a smarter parser that includes optional 
                  support for validation, and required fields.</li>
                  
                  <li>Support RSS 2.0 (as much as I'm annoyed by it)</li>
                  
                  <li>Improve support for modules that rely on attributes</li>
          </ul>
          
          <h4>RSS Cache</h4>
          <ul>
                  <li>Light-weight garbage collection
          </ul>
          
          <h4>Fetch RSS</h4>
          <ul>
          <li>Attempt to <a
          href="http://diveintomark.org/archives/2002/08/15.html">auto-detect an
          RSS feed</a>, given a URL following, much like <a
          href="http://diveintomark.org/projects/misc/rssfinder.py.txt">rssfinder.py</a>does.
          </li>
          </ul>
          <h4>Misc</h4>
                  <ul>
                  <li>More examples</li>
                  <li>A test suite</li>
                  <li>RSS generation, perhaps with <a
          href="http://usefulinc.com/rss/rsswriter/">RSSwriter</a>?
                  </li>
                  </ul>
          
  </p>
  <p>
  <h3>RSS Resources</h3>
          <ul>
          <li><a href="http://mnot.net/rss/tutorial/">RSS Tutorial for Content Publishers
          and Webmasters</a> is a great place to start.
          <li><a href="http://gils.utah.gov/rss/">RSS Workshop:  Publish and Syndicate
          Your News to the Web</a> is also a good introduction</li>
          <li><a href="http://www.disobey.com/amphetadesk/finding_more.html">Finding
          More Channels</a> on how to find RSS feeds.
          <li>Hammersley's <a href="http://rss.benhammersley.com/">Content Syndication
          with XML and RSS</a> is a blog covering RSS current events.
          <li><a href="http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rss-dev/">RSS-DEV mailing
          list</a> is generally a very helpful, informative space, with the occasional
          heated debate        
          <li><a href="http://feeds.archive.org/validator/">RSS Validator</a>
          </ul>.
  </p>
  <h3>License and Contact Info</h3>
  Magpie is distributed under the GPL license...
  <p>
  coded by: kellan (at) protest.net, feedback is always appreciated.
  <p>
  <a href="http://sourceforge.net"><img
  src="http://sourceforge.net/sflogo.php?group_id=55691&type=3" 
  width="125" height="37" border="0" alt="SourceForge.net Logo"></a>
  <img src="http://laughingmeme.org/magpie_views.gif">
  </body>
  </html>
[] readme course(s) preface I 1 2 II 3 4 III 5 6 7 IV 8 9 10 V 11 12 afterthought(s) appendix reference(s) example(s) resource(s) _

(C) Æliens 20/2/2008

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