Using RSS as a data source

Many blogs and news sites offer RSS feeds of their content. Using Laravel, we can get those feeds and display them as a feed reader, or even save them in our own database.

Getting ready

For this recipe, we just need a standard Laravel installation, and RSS URL to use.

How to do it...

To complete this recipe, follow this step:

1. Create a new route in our routes.php file to read in the RSS:

   Route::get('rss', function()
   {
       $source = 'http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss';
   
       $headers = get_headers($source);
       $response = substr($headers[0], 9, 3);
       if ($response == '404')
       {
           return 'Invalid Source';
       }
       
       $data = simplexml_load_string(file_get_contents($source));
   
       if (count($data) == 0)
       {
           return 'No Posts';
       }
           $posts = '';
           foreach($data->channel->item as $item)
           {
               $posts .= '<h1><a href="' . $item->link . '">'. $item->title . '</a></h1>';
            ...