Recently we had a customer at the office who wanted a news feed from a related site displayed on their homepage. As a design element we wanted to extract the first image in the description part of each news item in the feed and display it in a separate container inside the flash file.

The PHP file, flavored with a RSS class and a JSON class

You need LastRSS from Oslab and Services_JSON from Pear. This is the full listing of the PHP file:

header('Content-type: application/json; charset=utf-8');<br />require_once('lastRSS.php');<br />require_once('JSON.php');<br /><br />$rss = new lastRSS; <br />$rss-&gt;cache_dir = './cache'; <br />$rss-&gt;CDATA = 'content';<br />$rss-&gt;cache_time = 1800; // half hour<br /><br />// Try to load and parse RSS file <br />if ($rs = $rss-&gt;get('http://www.yourdomain.no/rss')) { <br /><br />    for($i = 0; $i &lt; count($rs['items']); $i++) {<br />        // Create and extra field to hold the image from description<br />        $rs['items'][$i]['image'] = &quot;&quot;;<br />        // Does description contain a image? If yes but the url in the image field<br />        if(preg_match('/(?&lt;=\&quot;)http:\/\/[^\&quot;]+(?=\&quot;)/i', $rs['items'][$i]['description'], $matches) ) {<br />            $rs['items'][$i]['image'] = $matches[0];<br />        }<br />        // Remove html tags and fix the encoding of norwegian chars, both in title and description<br />        $rs['items'][$i]['title'] = utf8_encode(strip_tags($rs['items'][$i]['title']));<br />        $rs['items'][$i]['description'] = utf8_encode(strip_tags($rs['items'][$i]['description']));<br />    }<br />    // Create a JSON class and output it as JSON<br />    $json = new Services_JSON();<br />    echo $json-&gt;encode($rs);<br />} else { <br />    echo &quot;Error: It's not possible to reach RSS file...\n&quot;; <br />}<br />?&gt; 

Parse JSON in Flash

You need a JSON AS 2 class from json.org. To display the RSS feed in grapical manners you might create a movieclip with two dynamic textfields, one for the title and one for the description. I also created a movieclip inside to hold the image. Create an invisible button on the top layer to connect the a getURL action. Place this code in the root layer of your flash file:

import JSON.*;<br /><br />var json = new JSON();<br />var thisObj = this;<br />var jsondata:LoadVars = new LoadVars(); <br />var jsonObj:Object = {};<br /><br />jsondata.onData = function(src:String) {<br />    if (src  undefined) {

        trace("Error loading content.");

        return;

    }

    thisObj.jsonObj = json.parse(src); 

    thisObj.buildRSS();

};

// Load the PHP file that output JSON

jsondata.load("http://www.yourdomain.com/output_json.php");



var rss_container:MovieClip = this.rss_container;



function buildRSS() {

    for (var i = 0; i

        var post:Object = jsonObj.items[i];

        var rss_item:MovieClip;

        rss_item = rss_container.attachMovie('rss_item', 'rss_item'+i, 10+i);

        rss_item._y = i*(rss_item._height);

        

        // Fills the text boxes

        rss_item.heading.text = post.title;

        rss_item.entry.text = post.description.substr(0, 140) + "..";;

        

        // Check if image, and load it..

        if (post.image != "") rss_item.rss_img.loadMovie(post.image);

        else rss_item.rss_img._alpha = 30;

        

        // Create alternativ backgrounds

        if (i%2  1) rss_item.bg.gotoAndStop(2);<br />        <br />        rss_item.layer.link = post.link;<br />        rss_item.layer.onPress = function() {<br />            getURL(this.link, &quot;_blank&quot;);<br />        }<br />    }<br />}   

RSS direct into flash [not used here]

Flash supports XML, but you would like to use a own class for the RSS handling. While working with this project I found this AS 2 class from 31tools.com. It works fine as long as you are able to place a crossdomain.xml (flash security ;-) file on the server you are getting content from. It don’t seems to show norwegian characters right, but that might be a problem related to server my RSS file was located.