Generate RSS Feed with PHP

Hi,

If you are looking for code to generate RSS via PHP, then I guess you already know what RSS is. So I am coming straight to the source code for generating it. In my example below, I am generating a RSS feed for the listing details of vaiours movies, which would contain, the movie name, image, description and a link to the details page of the particular movie.

I am keeping a database table for storing the details of the various movies. The table schema is as follows:

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `rss` (
  `id` int(10) NOT NULL auto_increment,
  `movie_name` varchar(100) collate latin1_general_ci default NULL,
  `category` varchar(50) collate latin1_general_ci default NULL,
  `pic` varchar(50) collate latin1_general_ci default NULL,
  `link` varchar(100) collate latin1_general_ci default NULL,
  `description` varchar(300) collate latin1_general_ci default NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY  (`id`)
)

As you see in the above schema, I have categorized the various movies. This will make it more dynamic. Now before going into the actual code and its explanation, lets see how the RSS feed looks like:

Code & Explanation:

First I have created a simple .htaccess file, for URL rewriting. My idea was, user will have the category_name.xml as the URL and the list will come according the category name. Here is the htaccess:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f

RewriteRule ^(.*)\.xml$ example.php?q=$1 [QSA,L]

In the above, all the url's ending with XML will be sent to example.php and the xml file name as the query string i.e. "?q="

Now coming to the code. The file example.php does all the hard work with the following:

First the database connection is build and the SQL query as:

<?php

mysql_connect("localhost","root");

mysql_select_db("test");

Parse XML with PHP

Hi,

Parsing XML have been a headache for quit a few programmers, including me ;) . So in this post I will give a very simple approach to achieve it. First let us consider an XML file, "simple.xml" with the following content:


<products>
 <product>
  <name>iPhone</name>
  <currency>$</currency>
  <price>199.99</price>
 </product>
 <product>
  <name>Galaxy Tab</name>
  <currency>$</currency>
  <price>299.99</price>
 </product>
</products>

Our motive is to navigate through each product and display their details in a listed format such as:



During such parsing all you have to do is to use getElementsByTagName() function smartly. Here there is only 1 "products" tab but multiple "product" tag. So we need to run the loop on the "product" tag.

Here is how I have had done this. Create another file, "example.php" with the following: