Random RSS Item with PHP and ICONV for formatting.

by admin on December 19, 2009 · 9 Comments

So I had to hack together a little snippet today that would return just one single item from a rss feed and have it be random from the available items.

(For example this snippet of code will return one random rss item from blackhatdigest – skipping the most recent entry)

function load_xml_feed($location)
{
global $value1;
$feedXml = simplexml_load_file($location);

$i= ’1′;
foreach ($feedXml->channel->item as $article)
{
$title[$i] = (string)$article->title;
$link[$i] = (string)$article->link;
$description[$i] = (string)$article->description;

$i++;

}
$randnumber = rand(2, $i);
$link = trim($link[$randnumber]);
$title = trim($title[$randnumber]);
$description = trim($description[$randnumber]);
$title = iconv(“UTF-8″, “ISO-8859-1″, $title);
$description = iconv(“UTF-8″, “ISO-8859-1″, $description);
$value1 = array($title,$link,$description);
return $value1;
}

$rss = ‘http://feeds.feedburner.com/BlackHatSeoDigest’;
load_xml_feed($rss);
$link = $value1[1];
$title = $value1[0];
$description = $value1[2];

echo $link;
echo $title;
echo $description;

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9 Responses to Random RSS Item with PHP and ICONV for formatting.

  1. admin says:
    December 30, 2009 at 5:15 am

    If you want to include the most recent item from the feed as well you just need to change this line:

    $randnumber = rand(2, $i);

    Make it:

    $randnumber = rand(1, $i);

    Reply
  2. William says:
    December 31, 2009 at 4:57 am

    Hey Thanks for the script and the information very useful.
    I hope you have a very safe, and Wonderful New Year.

    Reply
  3. Mike says:
    December 31, 2009 at 12:41 pm

    Nice script. But i dont think you can use multiple return commands inside a single function.

    Reply
  4. Scott says:
    May 15, 2010 at 7:40 pm

    Hi Ed

    I was playing around with your little script and get the following error:

    Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING in /home/scottpar/public_html/spgraphic/jackie1/rss.php on line 21

    This is line 21:

    $title = iconv(“UTF-8?, “ISO-8859-1?, $title);

    Wondered if you had any ideas?

    Thanks

    Scott

    Reply
  5. admin says:
    June 9, 2010 at 2:17 am

    Yep copy and pasting strikes – you have ? instead of ” right after the iso type.

    Reply
  6. admin says:
    August 24, 2010 at 6:24 am

    For all of you driving me nuts about this snippet please note that for some strange reason WP is converting quotes into strange characters. Just replace them and it works fine.

    Reply
  7. Steve says:
    September 26, 2010 at 9:46 pm

    do you have an example page of where you have this code installed? I can’t seem to figure out how to properly place it on a php page and display any results. Thanks

    Reply
  8. Steve says:
    September 26, 2010 at 10:08 pm

    never mind… I read through and looked at the code and noticed it copy and pasted incorrect characters for the “, the ‘, and the ?. I got it working just fine now. Sweet Code, thanks!

    Reply

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