MagpieRSS makes it quite easy to fetch RSS feeds in PHP.
To get an array of RSS items from an RSS URL:
require('rss_fetch.inc');
$rss = fetch_rss($url);
$rssItems = $rss->items;
That’s it!
do a var_dump on the $rss->items array to see the RSS feed in MagpieRSS’s simple array structure.