Learning PHP and having problem with seemingly simple script

Hi, I've been teaching myself PHP and am trying to create a script that pulls the titles of an RSS feed then checks titles against a list of titles in a text file. If the title does not exist, it adds it to the file and prints it on the screen, otherwise it skips it. I use SimplePie for the RSS pulling. This is my code:

<?php

require_once("simplepie/simplepie.inc");

$feed = new SimplePie('http://www.sonicbids.com/RSS/Feeds/UpcomingSubmissionDeadlines.rss');

$file = fopen("sonicbids.txt", "a+");

$filearray = file($file);

foreach($feed->get_items() as $item)
{
$flag = 0;
foreach($filearray as $line) {
if ($item->get_title() == $line) {
$flag = 1;
}
}
if ($flag==0) {
fwrite ($file, $item->get_title()."\r\n");
echo $item->get_title();
echo ";";
?>
<br />
<?php
}
}

?>

When I run it I get this error code:

Warning: file() expects parameter 1 to be string, resource given in /blah/blah/b/l/a/blah/html/sonicbidsrss.php on line 9

Then for each item in the Feed it spits out this error:

Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /blah/blah/b/l/a/blah/html/sonicbidsrss.php on line 14


Any help is greatly appreciated, thank you.

 

SimplePie is not really needed for this, it's over kill. If you're using PHP 5 - you can use SimpleXML. Which would be a lot faster.

This does what you want with no extra libraries:

<?php
    $feed_url = 'http://www.sonicbids.com/RSS/Feeds/UpcomingSubmissionDeadlines.rss';
    $feed_txt = 'sonicbids.txt';  

    // get the RSS feed
    $feed_xml = new SimpleXMLElement(file_get_contents($feed_url));

    // retrieve all the current titles that are saved in the text file
    $titles = file($feed_txt, FILE_SKIP_EMPTY_LINES | FILE_IGNORE_NEW_LINES);

    // create a file handle so we can write new ones into the file
    $file_handle = fopen($feed_txt, 'a+');

    foreach ($feed_xml->channel->item as $item) {     
        if (! in_array($item->title, $titles)) {
            fwrite($file_handle, $item->title . "\r\n");
            echo $item->title . ';';   
        }
    }
?>

PHP:

 

Wow, yeah that does seem a lot simpler. That in_array function is very useful, thank you. For the sake of learning what would you say was actually wrong with my script? Was I not pulling the file into an array correctly since it was giving me an error on that line?

Thank you again.

 

You passed file() a file handle instead of a string (the filename). You should have also trimmed the newline from each line (you could use the FILE_IGNORE_NEW_LINES flag to do this automatically).

Glad to help.