In this new post to her blog Lorna Mitchell looks at some of the work she's done to extract information out of the Google Analytics accounts API via an OAuth interface and parsed via SimpleXML.

I'm using pecl_oauth to authenticate users against their google accounts (see my post about using OAuth from PHP), but even after I have a valid google user, working out which analytics accounts they have access to and how to refer to them is a puzzle in itself, so I thought I'd share what I learned.

In her example she shows how to fetch the permissions for a user (which analytics they can access) via a call to the "/feeds/datasources/ga/accounts" URL. This returns some XML easily parsed by SimpleXML to grab the accounts' names and IDs. This is used to fetch the profiles and gather the "magic tableId" for use with the Export API to pull the actual data.