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:

<?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.