General Usage (Draft)

Fetching Feeds Over HTTP

TBD.

Caching Data

TBD.

Working with Node types

With few exceptions, every value that comes out of SimplePie is a Node type.

One of the complexities of working with Atom feeds (and sometimes RSS feeds) is that the content you're looking for may be serialized as text, html, or xhtml. This was something that we didn't solve very well in SimplePie OG, so it's something that I've paid better attention to in SimplePie NG by exposing these serializations.

Let's say that you want to get the author of a feed.

$author = $feed->getAuthor();

There are a few things that we do with this. If we were to type-cast it as a string, then it would trigger the __toString() function on the class.

echo (string) $author . PHP_EOL;
#=> Ryan Parman <http://ryanparman.com>

However, maybe we want to display the author's information differently. We know that $author is a type of Person.

echo get_class($author) . PHP_EOL;
#=> SimplePie\Type\Person

Person has three methods: getName(), getUrl(), and getEmail().

echo sprintf(
  "%s\ne: %s\nw: %s",
  (string) $author->getName(),
  (string) $author->getEmail(),
  (string) $author->getUrl()
) . PHP_EOL;
#=> Ryan Parman
#=> e: [email protected]
#=> w: http://ryanparman.com

If you were to check the types of getName(), getUrl(), and getEmail(), you'll see that they're all Node types.

echo get_class($author->getName()) . PHP_EOL;
#=> SimplePie\Type\Node

The Node type's __toString() method will call out to its getValue() method to stringify the value.

echo (string) $author->getName() . PHP_EOL;
#=> Ryan Parman

The Node type itself has a few methods: getValue(), getSerialization(), and getNode().

getValue() is where the actual value itself is stored -- it simply gets bubbled up by higher-level calls. It's the first time that a value doesn't need to be type-cast as a string.

echo $author->getName()->getValue() . PHP_EOL;
#=> Ryan Parman

getSerialization() is how we can tell which serialization (text, html, or xhtml) the content inside the feed is using.

echo $author->getName()->getSerialization() . PHP_EOL;
#=> text

switch ($author->getName()->getSerialization()) {
    case 'xhtml':
        // Custom XML stuff...
        break;
    case 'text':
    case 'html':
    default:
        echo $author->getName()->getValue();
}
#=> Ryan Parman

Lastly, getNode() returns the low-level DOMNode element, just in case you wanted to access the data that the parser has directly.

Working with DateTime types

TBD.