Opening and ending tag mismatch & Premature end of data in tag rss

Question

I'm trying to parse RSS feed from this link http://www.gazetaexpress.com/rss.php?cid=1,13&part=rss but when i try displaying the results it gives me the following error:

Warning: DOMDocument::load() [domdocument.load]: Opening and ending tag mismatch: strong line 208 and description in http://www.gazetaexpress.com/rss.php?cid=1,13&part=rss, line: 209 in C:\wamp\www\gazetaExpress\scripts\reader.php on line 17

as well as

Warning: DOMDocument::load() [domdocument.load]: Premature end of data in tag rss line 2 in http://www.gazetaexpress.com/rss.php?cid=1,13&part=rss, line: 226 in C:\wamp\www\gazetaExpress\scripts\reader.php on line 17

the script that i'm using for parsing is

 $xmlDoc->load($xml);

$x=$xmlDoc->getElementsByTagName('item');

for ($i=0; $i<6; $i++)  {
    $item_title=$x->item($i)->getElementsByTagName('title')->item(0)->childNodes->item(0)->nodeValue;
    $item_link=$x->item($i)->getElementsByTagName('link')->item(0)->childNodes->item(0)->nodeValue;
    $item_desc=$x->item($i)->getElementsByTagName('description')->item(0)->childNodes->item(0)->nodeValue;

 // and echo statements

}

When I try some other rss feed from this site (like sports: http://www.gazetaexpress.com/rss.php?cid=1,24&part=rss), it works fine. It's exactly the above rss feed that won't work. Is there any way to get around this? any help would be hugely appreciated.

Answer 1

When the fragment you want to parse is not conform to XML specs (eg self closing tags without '/' or unclosed tags) and if it dosesn't contain duplicate ids you can try with loadHTML, it's more permissive.

$xmlDoc->loadHTML($xml);

Answer 2

This is due to the usage of <br> and other self closing tags. The dom tries to find the end like this <br/> where <br is start and /> is end. Modern browsers will not have problems with <tag> but the php dom function still wants you to keep the XML standard so you need to find al the <singletags> and replace them with <singletags /> then it works just fine.