In what situations would requesting an RSS feed or XML file from a website be a more efficient method of obtaining data compared to parsing HTML directly?

Requesting an RSS feed or XML file from a website would be more efficient when you only need specific data structured in a standardized format. This method allows you to easily parse the data without having to deal with the complexities of parsing HTML directly. Additionally, RSS feeds and XML files are designed for machine readability, making it easier to extract the desired information. 

<?php
$rss_url = 'https://example.com/feed.xml';
$rss_feed = simplexml_load_file($rss_url);

foreach ($rss_feed->channel->item as $item) {
    echo $item->title . '<br>';
    echo $item->description . '<br><br>';
}
?>

Keywords

RSS feed XML file data extraction parsing efficiency

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