Looping through SimpleXMLElement Object works only in 2 steps

Question

I've got a SimpleXMLElement for which I read in a XML file using curl. Trying to get the values out of it I seem to need to use a nested foreach, but in a similar situation I was able to do this in one go. Now I'm really curious why this isn't working:

Its the delicious RSS feed;

SimpleXMLElement Object
(
    [title] => Delicious/chrisvdberge
    [link] => http://www.delicious.com/chrisvdberge
    [description] => bookmarks posted by chrisvdberge
    [item] => Array
        (
            [0] => SimpleXMLElement Object
                (
                    [title] => Diagrammr
                    [pubDate] => Thu, 06 May 2010 12:40:07 +0000
                    [guid] => http://www.delicious.com/url/2fc2ed0e870ec9d001b645dfaed0e771#chrisvdberge
                    [link] => http://www.diagrammr.com/
                    [comments] => http://www.delicious.com/url/2fc2ed0e870ec9d001b645dfaed0e771
                    [source] => chrisvdberge's bookmarks
                    [category] => Array
                        (
                            [0] => tagthis
                            [1] => visualization
                            [2] => diagrams
                        )

                )

            [1] => SimpleXMLElement Object
                (
                    [title] => Ignite Toronto 2: Ryan Coleman - Designing for visual efficiency on Vimeo
                    [pubDate] => Mon, 18 Jan 2010 08:05:06 +0000
                    [guid] => http://www.delicious.com/url/9a0de307f3f37baaa25ad20b4dbc4537#chrisvdberge
                    [link] => http://vimeo.com/8317770
                    [comments] => http://www.delicious.com/url/9a0de307f3f37baaa25ad20b4dbc4537
                    [source] => chrisvdberge's bookmarks
                    [category] => Array
                        (
                            [0] => tagthis
                            [1] => vizthink
                        )

                )

etc.

I can access all the links by using a nested foreach:

foreach ($delicious_res as $item) {
    foreach ($item->item as $entry){
        echo $entry->link."<br />";
    }
}

But I don't understand why I cant use this (which I can in another situation)

foreach ($delicious_res->item as $item) {
        echo $entry->link."<br />";
}

I really like to understand why in order to get a better understanding of SimpleXML in general ;)

Answer 1

You have to use:

foreach($delicious_res->channel->item as $item) {
    print_r($item);
}

Because the collection of items is inside the <rss> and <channel> tag (the <rss> tag can be omitted as it is the root node of the document).

On another note: if you are not doing anything fancy, you probably don´t need to use curl to fetch the rss feeds xml content. Just use simplexml_load_file with the url as an argument:

$delicious_res = simplexml_load_file('http://path-to-your/file.xml"');