comparing PHP RSS parsers

For a little project I’m working on, I needed to do some RSS parsing. I quickly found lastRSS, magpie and the Pear XML Feed Parsing Library. I wasn’t sure which was the best, so I decided to do a little apples to apples to apples comparison. I created the PHP RSS Comparator to help me figure out which library worked on the most feeds and had the best performance.

My findings so far? Magpie is rock solid, seems to handle nearly every feed I throw at it. When LastRSS handles a feed, it handles it the fastest. The Pear XML Feed Parsing library trips up on the same feeds that break LastRSS, but it is also a lot slower than LastRSS. The cache in LastRSS is effective and a very good idea.

It’s possible that I’m mis-using the Pear or Last RSS libraries, but I basically did the same thing with all three libraries which is to start from their own sample code and then make minimal changes so that they all showed the same results.

I can definitely see why they use magpie for wordpress. It isn’t as fast as LastRSS, but it is close and it handles a lot of feeds that lastRSS does not. The Pear XML Feed Parsing library may be powerful, but it doesn’t work well enough on real-world feeds to make it worthwhile for me.

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