Vance Lucas

Just thought I’d post a quick HOW-TO article on how to get the contents of a FeedBurner feed with PHP, because it’s something I was attempting to do last night that really annoyed me.  Since I started this blog here, I decided to narrow another website of mine – czaries.net – to just distribute some PHP scripts I’ve made and take down the news that was there.  I replaced it with a short paragraph explanation and a feed of the recent blog posts here.  The problem was, the feed wasn’t displaying, and I couldn’t figure out why.

I visited the feed URL in my browser, and viola – the XML feed content was there.  I double-checked the URL in PHP, and it was the same, but I was getting a 404 error instead.  Odd. Turns out, viewing a FeedBurner feed requires the presence of a USER-AGENT string (The string that identifies the operating system, browser, and language of your computer). So the solution is to use PHP’s cURL library to send a USER-AGENT string along with the request, like so:

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<?php
// URL location of your feed
$feedUrl = "http://feeds.feedburner.com/VanceLucas?format=xml";
$feedContent = "";
 
// Fetch feed from URL
$curl = curl_init();
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, $feedUrl);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 3);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HEADER, false);
 
// FeedBurner requires a proper USER-AGENT...
curl_setopt($curl, CURL_HTTP_VERSION_1_1, true);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_ENCODING, "gzip, deflate");
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.3) Gecko/2008092417 Firefox/3.0.3");
 
$feedContent = curl_exec($curl);
curl_close($curl);
 
// Did we get feed content?
if($feedContent && !empty($feedContent)):
	$feedXml = @simplexml_load_string($feedContent);
	if($feedXml):
?>
	<h2>From The Blog...</h2>
	<ul>
	  <?php foreach($feedXml->channel->item as $item): ?>
		<li style="padding:4px 0;"><a href="<?php echo $item->link; ?>"><?php echo $item->title; ?></a></li>
	  <?php endforeach; ?>
	</ul>
	<?php endif; ?>
<?php endif; ?>

The code above gets the feed contents and then displays a nice summary of all the headlines in an unordered list with links using SimpleXML. Feel free to replace the USER-AGENT string with your own, or simply leave it as-is. The current one is for Windows XP and Firefox 3.03. You can get your own USER-AGENT string from a phpinfo() call towards the bottom of the page in the environment variables section.