Posts tagged beta

I promised more work on XML_Feed_Parser this month and am pleased to say I found the time. The first beta, version 0.3, is on its way into PEAR.

Two key developments in this version are support for the ‘content’ module in RSS2 and fix of a serious bug in the main __call method. I was accessing the compatMap variable (that handles the mapping of element names between different syndication formats) directly, and calling array_pop on it. That threw up problems if you wanted to access the same element multiple times, so I’ve added in a temporary variable to fix that.

The main development, however, is experimental support for the tidy library. If you think (or know) the feed you’re working with might not be valid XML, you can now choose to have tidy clean up the code before it gets handed to the DOM. Handling ill-formed XML is a much requested feature, and initial testing of this solution yields positive results.

Paying projects have kept me away from XML_Feed_Parser for the past couple of months, but today finally brought time to get a new release into shape.

The main focus has been on working through the tests that come with The Universal Feed Parser. I have a (rudimentary) script that converts those tests into PHP and makes some syntax conversion to bring them into line with my package. There’s still some hand tweaking required to get the tests running properly, but for the time being that seems preferable to writing a full lexer.

With those tweaks in place, the package now passes the majority of the Atom 1.0 tests. Along the way I’ve added a few new compatibility features (guid now maps to id in atom, in some cases uses of url/href will automatically map to uri where that’s appropriate), and cleaned up the workings of the __call magic function that does a lot of the dispatching within and between the classes.

Another major addition is the decoding of base64 encoded atom:text constructs.

Hopefully development will pick up speed over the next few weeks. My aim is to have a beta out some time in January.