Randomize external RSS feed order in PHP

Question

I'm using a third-party AJAX slideshow for a website that takes an RSS feed as its picture source. I would like to randomize the order of the pictures, but that's not a feature of the slideshow (or the RSS feed I'm pulling from).

Surely it shouldn't be difficult to write a short function in PHP that takes an external RSS feed, randomizes the items and re-publishes the same feed 'out of order'. I just can't seem to make it work.

Answer 1

Are you using DOM XML? Then just shuffle the array on import.

$xml = new DOMDocument();
$articles = $xml->getElementsByTagName("article");
$data = array();
foreach ($articles as $article) {
    data[] = ...
}
shuffle($data);

Answer 2

What worked:

$dom = new DOMDocument;
$dom->load($url);

// Load the <channel> element for this particular feed
$channel = $dom->documentElement->firstChild;

$items = $channel->getElementsByTagName('item');

// duplicate $items as $allitems, since you can't remove child nodes
// as you iterate over a DOMNodeList
$allitems = array();
foreach ($items as $item) {
 $allitems[] = $item;
 }

// Remove, shuffle, append
foreach ($allitems as $item) {
 $channel->removeChild($item);
}

shuffle($allitems);

foreach ($allitems as $item) {
 $channel->appendChild($item);
 }

print $dom->saveXML();

}