Parsing a Flickr feed with SimpleXML

Parsing a Flickr RSS feed requires some preparatory steps. First of all, I tried to download a static copy of my feeds using wget just to study the file structure. Wrong choice! In fact, the format returned was Atom, not RSS. So I used the following approach:

$file = file_get_contents('http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=31968388@N02&lang=it-it&format=rss_200');
echo $file;

So I got the correct format. Parsing the feed is quite a simple task:

$rss = simplexml_load_file('http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=31968388@N02&lang=it-it&format=rss_200');
    
    foreach($rss->channel->item as $entry) {
    
    
    
        $title = $entry->title;
        $raw_published = $entry->pubDate;
        $published = str_replace('-0700', '', $raw_published);
        $raw_content = $entry->description;
        $content = html_entity_decode($raw_content, UTF-8);
        
        
        echo '<li>' . "\n" . '<h2>' . $title . '</h2>' . "\n" . '<p class="pubdate">' . $published . "</p>\n" . 
        $content . "</li>\n";
    
    
    
    
    }

Two notes here:

1. you need to start parsing from the root element, not from the SimpleXMLObject itself
2. the description element contains markup that needs to be expanded using the html_entity_decode() function

You can see this test here.