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I am parsing an RSS feed using PHP and JavaScript. First I created a proxy with PHP to obtain the RSS feed. Then get individual data from this RSS feed using JavaScript. My issue with with the JavaScript. I am able to get the entire JavaScript document if I use console.log(rssData); with no errors. If I try to get individual elements within this document say for example: <title>, <description>, or <pubDate> using rssData.getElementsByName("title"); it gives an error "Uncaught TypeError: Object....has no method 'getElementsByName'". So my question is how to I obtain the elements in the RSS feed?

Javascript (Updated)

function httpGet(theUrl) {
    var xmlHttp = null;

    xmlHttp = new XMLHttpRequest();
    xmlHttp.open("GET", theUrl, false);
    xmlHttp.send(null);
    return xmlHttp.responseXML;
}

// rss source
var rssData = httpGet('http://website.com/rss.php');

// rss values
var allTitles = rssData.getElementsByTagName("title");    // title
var allDate = rssData.getElementsByTagName("pubDate");    // date
share|improve this question
xmlHttp.responseText is a String. Strings do not have a getElementsByName() function. Are you expecting an XML response? Try xmlHttp.responseXML instead. Also, you might run into cross-domain issues doing this with JS. You might want to get the feed on the PHP side through an AJAX request to your own application. – Cory May 14 '12 at 20:22
@Cory thank you for the response, and yes xmlHttp.responseXML is exactly what I was looking for. I also added the origin policy header to all access. – Mr. 1.0 May 14 '12 at 20:30

1 Answer

up vote 2 down vote accepted

Try changing the last line of the httpGet function to:

return xmlHttp.responseXML;

After all, you are expecting an XML response back. You may also need to add this line to your PHP proxy:

header("Content-type: text/xml");

To force the return content to be sent as XML.

share|improve this answer
return xmlHttp.responseXML; is exactly what I needed thank you. – Mr. 1.0 May 14 '12 at 20:28
Can you help me with one more thing? I want to loop over all the dates and only return the titles that match the current date of today. I updated my post. – Mr. 1.0 May 14 '12 at 21:09
That is another question entirely. – D. Strout May 14 '12 at 21:16

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