The example you provided should not generate an error. I tested it and $linkthumb contained the string “example text string” as expected
Ensure the media namespace is defined in the returned XML otherwise DOMDocument will error out.
If you are getting a specific error, please edit your post to include it
Edit:
Try the following code:
$xmldoc = new DOMDocument();
$xmldoc->load('api response address');
foreach ($xmldoc->getElementsByTagName('item') as $feeditem) {
$nodes = $feeditem->getElementsByTagName('file');
$linkthumb = $nodes->item(0)->getAttribute('data');
echo $linkthumb;
}
You may also want to look at SimpleXML and Xpath as it makes reading XML much easier than DOMDocument.