[thelist] getting RSS feeds via PHP

[Simon Willison]

Mark Lee wrote:
> I'm trying to write some php to get, parse, and display RSS feeds.  Not 
> a monumental task, I thought.
> It seems, however, that my web host has fopen(), fsockopen(), and 
> similar functions disabled.  I tried to be  clever and override this 
> setting with:
> 
> ini_set ( 'allow_url_fopen', '1') or die('oh dang!');
> 
> but of course that'd be too easy. Does anyone have any experience with 
> alternate solutions? Is there any way to access remote files without 
> fopen()?

Probvided your host hasn't disabled socket functions completely, you 
should be able to retrieve files using my HttpClient library:

http://scripts.incutio.com/httpclient/

It doesn't rely on the url fopen setting.

Hope that helps,

Simon Willison
http://simon.incutio.com/