Get the Feedburner original link with PHP

Many websites use Feedburner to serve their RSS feed. The link from the Feedburner feed to the article is a Feedburner URL which then redirects to the original URL. The original URL is still contained in the XML for the feed in the element named <feedburner:origLink> and this can be parsed out using PHP’s SimpleXML library, but it’s not quite as simple as referring to ->feedburner:origLink because this will not work.

The wrong way

If you attempt to do the following with PHP, where $xmlobj is a SimpleXML object with XML loaded from a Feedburner RSS feed:

echo $xmlobj->item[0]->feedburner:origLink;

you will get the following error:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected ':' in ...

The right way

The colon indicates that the "origElement" belongs to the "feedburner" namespace. The way to get the information using SimpleXML is a little convoluted and requires the URL for the namespace. The easiest way to get this is to use the getDocNamespaces() method:

$namespaces = $xmlobj->getDocNamespaces();

Doing print_r($namespaces) shows this for a Feedburner feed:

Array
(
    [content] => http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/
    [wfw] => http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/
    [dc] => http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/
    [atom] => http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom
    [sy] => http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/
    [feedburner] => http://rssnamespace.org/feedburner/ext/1.0
)

Pass the URL to the children() method to get the namespace and then the element can be accessed by name. The following example will echo the original link for the first item in the feed:

$feedburner_namespace = $xmlobj->channel->item[0]->children($namespaces['feedburner']);
echo $feedburner_namespace->origLink;

Putting it all together

Here’s a full example, which will echo the original links for each item for the feed for blog.healthy.co.nz:

$xml = file_get_contents('http://feeds2.feedburner.com/HealthyBlog-Healthyonline');

$xmlobj = new SimpleXMLElement($xml);

$namespaces = $xmlobj->getDocNamespaces();

foreach($xmlobj->channel->item as $item) {
    $feedburner_namespace = $item->children($namespaces['feedburner']);
    echo $feedburner_namespace->origLink, "n";
}

This will display (at the time of writing this post):

http://blog.healthy.co.nz/healthyonline-has-launched/
http://blog.healthy.co.nz/best-probiotic-supplement/
http://blog.healthy.co.nz/what-is-healthy-weight-loss/
http://blog.healthy.co.nz/is-aspartame-a-threat-to-your-health/
http://blog.healthy.co.nz/lifestyle-solutions-for-depression/
http://blog.healthy.co.nz/supplements-to-use-for-treating-depression/
http://blog.healthy.co.nz/how-to-increase-your-immunity-to-the-flu-colds-and-illness/
http://blog.healthy.co.nz/how-to-get-pregnant-and-the-reasons-some-women-cant/
http://blog.healthy.co.nz/pregnancy-multivitamin-supplement-review/
http://blog.healthy.co.nz/how-to-prepare-your-immune-system-with-winter-approaching/

You can then obviously use $item->[other stuff] to access the other elements within the item, or load additional namespaces to get values from other namespaced elements within the item.