Random RSS Item with PHP and ICONV for formatting.
Saturday, December 19th, 2009So 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;
Popularity: 5% [?]
admin says:
December 30th, 2009
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);
William says:
December 31st, 2009
4:57 am
Hey Thanks for the script and the information very useful.
I hope you have a very safe, and Wonderful New Year.
Mike says:
December 31st, 2009
12:41 pm
Nice script. But i dont think you can use multiple return commands inside a single function.
admin says:
December 31st, 2009
7:27 pm
Mike,
Bad copy and paste — but oddly enough that code worked. It shouldn’t have, but it did.
Scott says:
May 15th, 2010
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
admin says:
June 9th, 2010
2:17 am
Yep copy and pasting strikes – you have ? instead of ” right after the iso type.
admin says:
August 24th, 2010
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.