 <p>Based on the example from the <a href="http://rssphp.net/examples/" rel="nofollow">RSS parser</a>, each <code>$item</code> is an associative array with keys such as <code>title</code> and <code>description</code>. <code>['title']</code> is an array literal containing one string, <code>'title'</code>, if you want to access the title for an item, you would use <code>$item['title']</code> giving you something like:</p> <pre><code>$title = $item-&gt;addChild('title', $item['title']); //add title node </code></pre>