Flickr Namespace and array_multisort() Issues

Fri, 15 Dec 2006 18:15 UTC

Aaron Wormus recently criticized me on IRC for putting too much thought and effort into blogging. He may have a point there. I’ve got a huge list of things I want to write about, but I haven’t put forth the effort because I do take too much time to write a post. So, here goes one for writing up a quick post . . .

I recently upgraded a few things around here (in particular, an upgrade to PHP 5.2), and I noticed two issues that occurred after the upgrade:

1. My Flickr photo feed no longer worked, and

1. My blogroll was no longer sorting alphabetically

   I easily solved both of these issues:

   The Flickr photo feed

   I’m not entirely sure whether this problem was a result of the PHP 5.2 upgrade and SimpleXML becoming more particular about namespaces or Flickr simply changing the namespace string in their feed. I believe it was the latter. In short, my code stopped working because the namespace lacked a trailing slash (/). It would’ve been great if Flickr had notified everyone about this first.

   The code looked something like this:

   <?php
    
   $flickr_rss = simplexml_load_file('http://www.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=49198866@N00&format=rss_200');
    
   foreach ($flickr_rss->channel->item as $item)
   {
       $link   = (string) $item->link;
       $media  = $item->children('http://search.yahoo.com/mrss');
       $thumb  = $media->thumbnail->attributes();
       $url    = (string) $thumb['url'];
       $width  = (string) $thumb['width'];
       $height = (string) $thumb['height'];
       $title  = (string) $item->title;
    
       // display image here
   }
    
   ?>

   Note the namespace listed in $item->children(‘http://search.yahoo.com/mrss’);. It’s lacking a trailing slash. This was never a problem before, but it seems that the Flickr feed changed to include a trailing slash, so SimpleXML was no longer able to properly get the data. I simply changed it to http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/ (note the trailing slash), and all worked fine.

   Blogroll sorting

   This was more than likely a result of the upgrade to PHP 5.2, though I can’t be sure. My blog sorting code worked like this:

   <?php
    
   // sort by name
   $name = array();
   foreach ($blogs as $k => $v)
   {
       $name[$k] = $v['name'];
   }
   array_multisort($name, SORT_ASC, $blogs);
    
   ?>

   Unfortunately, after the upgrade, this no longer worked. I had to add the SORT_STRING flag as a parameter to array_multisort() so that the line now reads:

   <?php
    
   array_multisort($name, SORT_ASC, SORT_STRING, $blogs);
    
   ?>

   And that fixed it.

   Just thought I’d share the info in case this helps anyone.