Parsing an XML Sitemap in PHP

This post shows you how to parse an XML sitemap using PHP. Let’s take a look at the below code:

<?php
// sitemap url or sitemap file
$sitemap = 'https://bytenota.com/sitemap.xml';

// get sitemap content
$content = file_get_contents($sitemap);

// parse the sitemap content to object
$xml = simplexml_load_string($content);

// retrieve properties from the sitemap object
foreach ($xml->url as $urlElement) {
    // get properties
    $url = $urlElement->loc;
    $lastmod = $urlElement->lastmod;
    $changefreq = $urlElement->changefreq;
    $priority = $urlElement->priority;

    // print out the properties
    echo 'url: '. $url . '<br>';
    echo 'lastmod: '. $lastmod . '<br>';
    echo 'changefreq: '. $changefreq . '<br>';
    echo 'priority: '. $priority . '<br>';

    echo '<br>---<br>';
}

We first use file_get_contents function to get XML sitemap content and then use simplexml_load_string function to parse the content to object.

Finally, we iterate over the $xml->url array, retrieve necessary properties, and echo the property values in view.
 
Output:

url: https://bytenota.com/
lastmod: 
changefreq: always
priority: 1.0

---
url: https://bytenota.com/aspnet-get-ie-browser-version-using-csharp/
lastmod: 2018-05-30T04:11:52Z
changefreq: daily
priority: 0.9

---
url: https://bytenota.com/javascript-save-objects-in-html5-session-storage/
lastmod: 2018-05-25T08:28:08Z
changefreq: daily
priority: 0.7

---
url: https://bytenota.com/javascript-save-objects-in-html5-local-storage/
lastmod: 2018-05-25T06:08:41Z
changefreq: daily
priority: 0.7