sending RSS data into flash

andynick

Hey php gods,
I work with flash and I'm looking at ways to get data from an rss feed. Flash has security settings that don't allow it to grab files outside of the domain it's hosted on - so I want to build a php page that will grab it grab it for me and give that data to flash.

I've found a few example pages, but they're all calling lots of feeds and using variables passed from flash to determine what url to look at.....

Can anyone help me put together the most basic, simple php code to grab and pass a single rss feed?

It would be a HUGE help!
thanks,
andynick

bpat1434

Use [man]file_get_contents/man to grab the RSS feed XML file. Then, just have flash interact with the PHP file to grab it using the LoadVars() function.

Some good tutorials on the flash side can be found at Flash-DB

~Brett

andynick

very cool. Should I assume that after php grabs the data, it can be given to flash in delimited string format, or can flash simply read the php document as if it was an xml file and parse it?

bpat1434

No, you'll need to send the values back to Flash in the form of:

&var=val&var=val&var=val&var=val&var=val

~Brett

andynick

very cool. Should I assume that after php grabs the data, it can be given to flash in delimited string format, or can flash simply read the php document as if it was an xml file and parse it?

bpat1434

I revert to my post above....

~Brett

andynick

Whoops. sorry for the double post - not sure how that happened.

Check this -
I've actually disproved your comment - i successfully sent the entire content of the xml directly to flash without parsing it in php, sending it as one lump variable -- here's my code - as simple as i could have hoped for:

<?php
$rss = $_GET['rss'];
readfile($rss);
?>

My flash file simply commands:
file_xml.load("http://www.nickad.com/rss/andy_rss.php?rss=http://www.bungie.net/stats/halo2rss.ashx?g=DrewBombb");

It's extremely simple, flexible enough to let my flash determine the rss feed to grab, and i can use my actionscript to parse thru the data (and have tested it, successfully.)

the ONLY problem i'm finding is that I still have tags like "<title> whatever </title> in my content ---- regardless, this hasn't caused a problem with crawling thru the child nodes and such, so i can remove those manually later i guess.

Thanks a ton for the guidance - i hope that this helps those of you (like me) who work with actionscript but suck at php!!!!

andynick