An Easy Way to Display an RSS Feed with PHP

by c.bavota | Posted in Tutorials | 18 comments

Jul 15 2010

RSS feeds are everywhere, and sometimes it’s a good idea to display one to keep people in the loop of important posts from your site, or sites you think might be relevant. Luckily, PHP 5 introduced the DOM extension which make it easy to work with XML documents. Now all it takes is just a small bit of code to fetch and display a feed.

The following code will first create a new DOMDocument() into which we will load the WordPress.org RSS feed.

$rss = new DOMDocument();
$rss->load('http://wordpress.org/news/feed/');

Then we will single out certain elements and place them into an array. For this example, I will just fetch the title, description, link and published on date.

$feed = array();
foreach ($rss->getElementsByTagName('item') as $node) {
	$item = array ( 
		'title' => $node->getElementsByTagName('title')->item(0)->nodeValue,
		'desc' => $node->getElementsByTagName('description')->item(0)->nodeValue,
		'link' => $node->getElementsByTagName('link')->item(0)->nodeValue,
		'date' => $node->getElementsByTagName('pubDate')->item(0)->nodeValue,
		);
	array_push($feed, $item);
}

Finally, we set it to display 5 posts on screen with the titles linking directly to the original post.

$limit = 5;
for($x=0;$x<$limit;$x++) {
	$title = str_replace(' & ', ' &amp; ', $feed[$x]['title']);
	$link = $feed[$x]['link'];
	$description = $feed[$x]['desc'];
	$date = date('l F d, Y', strtotime($feed[$x]['date']));
	echo '<p><strong><a href="'.$link.'" title="'.$title.'">'.$title.'</a></strong><br />';
	echo '<small><em>Posted on '.$date.'</em></small></p>';
	echo '<p>'.$description.'</p>';
}

Put it all together and this is what you get:

<?php
	$rss = new DOMDocument();
	$rss->load('http://wordpress.org/news/feed/');
	$feed = array();
	foreach ($rss->getElementsByTagName('item') as $node) {
		$item = array ( 
			'title' => $node->getElementsByTagName('title')->item(0)->nodeValue,
			'desc' => $node->getElementsByTagName('description')->item(0)->nodeValue,
			'link' => $node->getElementsByTagName('link')->item(0)->nodeValue,
			'date' => $node->getElementsByTagName('pubDate')->item(0)->nodeValue,
			);
		array_push($feed, $item);
	}
	$limit = 5;
	for($x=0;$x<$limit;$x++) {
		$title = str_replace(' & ', ' &amp; ', $feed[$x]['title']);
		$link = $feed[$x]['link'];
		$description = $feed[$x]['desc'];
		$date = date('l F d, Y', strtotime($feed[$x]['date']));
		echo '<p><strong><a href="'.$link.'" title="'.$title.'">'.$title.'</a></strong><br />';
		echo '<small><em>Posted on '.$date.'</em></small></p>';
		echo '<p>'.$description.'</p>';
	}
?>

Not too complicated. All you need to change is the feed you want to load (line #3) and the number of posts to display (line #14). Of course, you could always play around with the output to get it styled exactly how you want. That is totally up to you.

Tags: Array, course, date, desc, description, Elements, Foreach, idea, limit, line, link, loop, org, title

Short URL: http://bit.ly/cWQrqR

18 comments for “An Easy Way to Display an RSS Feed with PHP”

io

July 26, 2010 at 2:03 pm

Thanks, it works great.
thealphasite

August 1, 2010 at 4:41 am

Excellent blog entry! Really useful! Keep it up
Pingback: An Easy Way to Display an RSS Feed with PHP « Web Page Authority Blog

tom

August 12, 2010 at 10:54 am

Exaclty what I was looking for, thank you. I’ve used it to pull in a feed from an external website which has very flaky performance so I’ve added an if else statement to return an error message if the value of $feed if null

load('http://www.informaworld.com/ampp/rss~content=t71610072');
	$feed = array();
	foreach ($rss->getElementsByTagName('item') as $node) {
		$item = array (
			'title' => $node->getElementsByTagName('title')->item(0)->nodeValue,
			'link' => $node->getElementsByTagName('link')->item(0)->nodeValue,
			);
		array_push($feed, $item);
	}
	$limit = 10;
	if ($feed == null) echo "does not compute";
	else
	for($x=0;$x<$limit;$x++) {
		$title = str_replace("&", "&amp;", $feed[$x]["title"]);
		$link = $feed[$x]["link"];
		echo '<a href="'.$link.'" title="'.$title.'" rel="nofollow">'.$title.'</a>';
	}
?>

Davide

November 30, 2010 at 4:15 am

Thanks in advance for providing the script and for the answer.
How to limit the description text?
Date is not displaying correct. How to fix?
John

February 8, 2011 at 5:12 pm

this is brilliant! – but I am a bit clueless… ummm how do I use my current style-sheet with this?

Thanks again for the article
John

February 9, 2011 at 5:49 am

doah! sorted that one! (just put a link to the style sheet) but, now.. how do I get a link in the RSS to open in a new window? .. sigh..

J
- c.bavota
  
  February 9, 2011 at 11:31 am
  
  Add a target="_blank" to the anchor tag.
mOe3

February 21, 2011 at 4:04 am

hi
nice job..sorry my english is low..

i want show just 5 characters at feed description..

—-how to limit characters to show description–
echo ”.$description.”;

tnx. im wait 4 answer
- c.bavota
  
  February 21, 2011 at 11:11 am
  This should do it:
  
  $description = explode(' ', $description, 5); $description = implode(" ",$description);

mOe3

February 22, 2011 at 3:11 am

hi .tnx for answer ,
i cant replace codes

can u make make something for me?
1- page encoding utf-8
2- look this rss link http://www.cbi.ir/ExRatesRss.aspx = i want to show just first 5 number (or 5 character`s)

i want like this demo
http://453831.20upload.net/files/1389/bahman/Capturevbi.png
yellow colored.

thank you for helping me..

$rss = new DOMDocument();
$rss->load('http://www.cbi.ir/ExRatesRss.aspx');
$feed = array();
foreach ($rss->getElementsByTagName('item') as $node) {
    $item = array (
        'title' => $node->getElementsByTagName('title')->item(0)->nodeValue,
        'desc' => $node->getElementsByTagName('description')->item(0)->nodeValue,
        'link' => $node->getElementsByTagName('link')->item(0)->nodeValue,
        'date' => $node->getElementsByTagName('pubDate')->item(0)->nodeValue,
        );
    array_push($feed, $item);
}
$limit = 5;
for($x=0;$x<$limit;$x  ) {
    $title = str_replace(' & ', ' & ', $feed[$x]['title']);
    $link = $feed[$x]['link'];
    $description = $feed[$x]['desc'];
    $date = date('l F d, Y', strtotime($feed[$x]['date']));

    echo '<p>'.$description.'</p>';
}

c.bavota

February 22, 2011 at 11:37 am
Add this right after the $description = $feed[$x]['link']; line.
```
$description = substr($description, 0, 5);
```

mOe3

February 22, 2011 at 2:21 pm

thank very much.
i do with your great help thanks..
Klaus

February 26, 2011 at 8:23 pm

Hi,

I have tried as well to add the
$description = substr($description, 0, 5);
line and it works fine to control the lenght of the description. However I would like that the last word get’s cut in the middle and also add the usual three dots at the end.
What code lines should I add and where?
Edgars

March 12, 2011 at 6:59 am
hi, article is exelent, but i need to retrive this two elements to, one is img and one is price, but it dose not work for me,
cant get this working corecly, can u sugest anything???
```
18.00
```
Lara

May 2, 2011 at 11:28 am
Great post, thanks! I’ve added the code to my theme but a few people using it have run into this error:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_OBJECT_OPERATOR, expecting ‘)’ …

on this line of code:
```
'title' => $node->getElementsByTagName('title')->item(0)->nodeValue,
```
I can’t replicate the error. Someone on this thread suggested it might be a conflict with GoDaddy, but someone with 1&1 hosting reported the same issue. Any ideas? Thanks.
- c.bavota
  
  May 2, 2011 at 12:55 pm
  
  The issue is probably the server not having the proper libraries installed in PHP.
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18 comments for “An Easy Way to Display an RSS Feed with PHP”