I am trying to generate an RSS Google Merchant, using SimpleXML.
The sample given by Google is:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<rss version="2.0"
xmlns:g="http://base.google.com/ns/1.0">
<channel>
<title>The name of your data feed</title>
<link>http://www.example.com</link>
<description>A description of your content</description>
<item>
<title>Red wool sweater</title>
<link> http://www.example.com/item1-info-page.html</link>
<description>Comfortable and soft, this sweater will keep you warm on those cold winter nights.</description>
<g:image_link>http://www.example.com/image1.jpg</g:image_link> <g:price>25</g:price> <g:condition>new</g:condition> <g:id>1a</g:id>
</item>
</channel>
</rss>
My code has things like:
$product->addChild("g:condition", 'new');
Which generates:
<condition>new</condition>
I read online that I should instead use:
$product->addChild("g:condition", 'new', 'http://base.google.com/ns/1.0');
Which now generates:
<g:condition xmlns:g="http://base.google.com/ns/1.0">new</g:condition>
This seems very counter-intuitive to me, as now the "xmlns" declaration is on almost EVERY line of my RSS feed intead of just once in the root element.
Am I missing something?
As @ceejayoz said, you need to add the "http://base.google.com/ns/1.0" namespace to the root node so that SimpleXML knows the namespace has already been declared and doesn't emit a duplicate prefix binding.
I think you may need to read a tutorial on XML Namespaces, because I'm not sure you really understand what the "g:" is doing here.
Here is a more complete example.
XML:
$xml = <<<EOT
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:g="http://base.google.com/ns/1.0">
<channel>
<title>The name of your data feed</title>
<link>http://www.example.com</link>
<description>A description of your content</description>
<item>
<title>Red wool sweater</title>
<link> http://www.example.com/item1-info-page.html</link>
<description>Comfortable and soft, this sweater will keep you warm on those cold winter nights.</description>
<g:image_link>http://www.example.com/image1.jpg</g:image_link>
<g:price>25</g:price>
<g:id>1a</g:id>
</item>
</channel>
</rss>
EOT
;
Code:
$rss = new SimpleXMLElement($xml);
$NS = array(
'g' => 'http://base.google.com/ns/1.0'
);
$rss->registerXPathNamespace('g', $NS['g']);
$product = $rss->channel->item[0]; // example
// Use the complete namespace.
// Don't add "g" prefix to element name--what prefix will be used is
// something SimpleXML takes care of.
$product->addChild('condition', 'new', $NS['g']);
echo $rss->asXML();
I usually use this pattern to deal with namespaces easily:
$rss = new SimpleXMLElement($xml);
$NS = array(
'g' => 'http://base.google.com/ns/1.0'
// whatever other namespaces you want
);
// now register them all in the root
foreach ($NS as $prefix => $name) {
$rss->registerXPathNamespace($prefix, $name);
}
// Then turn $NS to an object for more convenient syntax
$NS = (object) $NS;
// If I need the namespace name later, I access like so:
$element->addChild('localName', 'Value', $NS->g);
This do the trick:
$product->addChild('xmlns:g:condition', 'new');
You need to add that namespace to a parent node, preferably the root rss
one, so that the child nodes can inherit it instead of having to explicitly specify it each time.