This is a followup to my Simplepie post a while back. YouTube offers Atom feeds, great – you’d think. However the data that YouTube outputs in its Atom feeds is…a bit different to what you might expect from a standard RSS feed in that it contains a lot of escaped HTML. Essentially for each item’s descripton in the feed YouTube outputs something like the following:

<div style=”font-size: 12px; margin: 3px 0px;”><span></span></div></td>
<td style=”font-size: 11px; line-height: 1.4em; padding-left: 20px; padding-top: 1px;” width=”146″ valign=”top”><div><span style=”color: #666666; font-size: 11px;”>From:</span>
<a href=”http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=YouTube”>YouTube</a></div>
<div><span style=”color: #666666; font-size: 11px;”>Views:</span>
15774</div>

Which is basically a div that contains a table and is pretty intrusive if included in it’s native form. A rough and ready solution to just getting the bits you want (or at least I want) is to grab each … Read More »