[uf-discuss] Parsing XFN in PHP

[Julian Bond]

Let me expand on that.

Julian Bond <julian_bond at voidstar.com> Tue, 8 Apr 2008 15:21:37
>I'm really looking forward to the SG-API becoming useful, but right now 
>it's pretty flaky. There's a lot of pages you'd expect to be in there 
>that aren't and the result you get back aren't what you'd expect.

SG-API actually worked very well for my purposes. I'm looking for 
outward edges and they came back in a pretty convenient form. However, 
it's dependent on the underlying index, not reading the pages in real 
time. And several friendfeed pages I tried had no data or incomplete 
data because they'd been created since the last time the spider called. 
So it looks to me like SG-API is a useful research tool, but not a 
useful data import tool.

>>Alternatively, if you want to parse uFs in PHP, I believe hKit by Drew
>>McLellan [2] may have some @rel=me support?

Not yet. It seems to be extensible but there's only an extension for 
hCard at the moment. Reading between the lines, hKit is using Tidy to 
turn the html into well formed xhtml and then simpleXml to parse out the 
uFs. So going down that route or one like it seems to be the best 
option.

It would be good if there were actually some solid libraries to read all 
the uFs and especially XFN in PHP. A format that's easy to write but 
hard to read isn't terribly useful. :(

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