Shouldn’t have relied on an example with Last.fm. Use a simpler XML file.

For simple XML work, the simplexml method as the name “simplexml” implies, but it does not allow for any actual manipulation of the XML DOM (upon which many advanced interactions between PHP and XML rely) and it actually makes working with XML namespaces (like the Dublin Core, API-specific Namespaces, and any other custom namespaces that a data provider might use).

You should also do this:
$feed = ‘http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/2.0/?method=user.getrecenttracks&user=YourName&api_key=’;
$local = ‘YourName.xml’;
if( (!file_exists($local)) || (time() – filemtime($local) > 120) )
{
$contents = file_get_contents($feed);
$fp = fopen($local, “w”);
fwrite($fp, $contents);
fclose($fp);
}
$xml = simplexml_load_file($local);

Makes a local cache of the XML file every two minutes. This really improves the page load time.

If an xml element name contains reserved characters (in this case, a hyphen), you need to add curly braces around the item name e.g.

$lists = simplexml_load_string($response->data);
foreach($lists->{todo-list} as $list){
$this->TodosComplete = $this->TodosComplete + $list->{completed-count};
$this->TodosIncomplete = $this->TodosIncomplete + $list->{uncompleted-count};
}

@Wogan:
There is a way to output the XML again as a string: $xml->asXML(); will do this with the object we just made. Pretty easy and amazingly strong when adjusting the object!

Nice going! Will definitely be making use of it.

Btw, any functions around to re-encode a object as XML? Or is that the sole province of JSON?

~ Wogan