FeedParser: A PHP Class for Quick Feed Parsing

Well, it doesn’t require any further explanation — we the web developers know how often we need to parse feeds. It’s a very common practice to use SimpleXML for parsing feeds. But today Hasin vai (Hasin Hayder) showed me a very cool thing — the Google Feed Parser. It’s a web based feed parser that is internally used by Google. The coolest thing about the parser is that it returns data as JSON 🙂

Seeing the point, I quickly fired off my netbeans IDE and wrote a php class for quick feed parsing 😀 Why fetch the feed and then parse it? Let Google handle the parsing and fetch the parsed results 🙂 Google is really making our lives simpler!

Here’s the class definition:

<?php
// Filename: feedparser.php
class FeedParser {
    function parse($feedUrl="https://masnun.com/feed/rss/",$number=5) {
        $feedUrl = urlencode($feedUrl);
        $gUrl = "http://www.google.com/uds/Gfeeds?num={$number}&hl=en&output=json&q={$feedUrl}&v=1.0";
        $json = json_decode(file_get_contents($gUrl),true);
        return  $json["responseData"]["feed"];
    }
}
?>

<?php

// Filename: feedparser.php

class FeedParser {

function parse($feedUrl="https://masnun.com/feed/rss/",$number=5) {

$feedUrl = urlencode($feedUrl);

$gUrl = "http://www.google.com/uds/Gfeeds?num={$number}&hl=en&output=json&q={$feedUrl}&v=1.0";

$json = json_decode(file_get_contents($gUrl),true);

return $json["responseData"]["feed"];

}

So, how do you use it? Initiate a new FeedParser object and then call the parse() method with the feed URL and entry count. The second parameter is optional and is “5” by default.

<?php
include("feedparser.php");
$parser = new FeedParser();
$data = $parser->parse("https://masnun.com/feed/rss/",3);
echo  $data["entries"][2]['title']."\n";
?>

<?php

include("feedparser.php");

$parser = new FeedParser();

$data = $parser->parse("https://masnun.com/feed/rss/",3);

echo $data["entries"][2]['title']."\n";

So what do we get in the $data array? Good question, lets see :

<?php
include("feedparser.php");
$parser = new FeedParser();
$data = $parser->parse("https://masnun.com/feed/rss/",3);
var_dump( $data );
?>

<?php

include("feedparser.php");

$parser = new FeedParser();

$data = $parser->parse("https://masnun.com/feed/rss/",3);

var_dump( $data );

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