module RSS
RSS
reading and writing¶ ↑
Really Simple Syndication (RSS
) is a family of formats that describe ‘feeds,’ specially constructed XML
documents that allow an interested person to subscribe and receive updates from a particular web service. This portion of the standard library provides tooling to read and create these feeds.
The standard library supports RSS
0.91, 1.0, 2.0, and Atom
, a related format. Here are some links to the standards documents for these formats:
Consuming RSS
¶ ↑
If you’d like to read someone’s RSS
feed with your Ruby code, you’ve come to the right place. It’s really easy to do this, but we’ll need the help of open-uri:
require 'rss' require 'open-uri' url = 'http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/feeds/news.rss' open(url) do |rss| feed = RSS::Parser.parse(rss) puts "Title: #{feed.channel.title}" feed.items.each do |item| puts "Item: #{item.title}" end end
As you can see, the workhorse is RSS::Parser#parse, which takes the source of the feed and a parameter that performs validation on the feed. We get back an object that has all of the data from our feed, accessible through methods. This example shows getting the title out of the channel element, and looping through the list of items.
Producing RSS
¶ ↑
Producing our own RSS
feeds is easy as well. Let’s make a very basic feed:
require "rss" rss = RSS::Maker.make("atom") do |maker| maker.channel.author = "matz" maker.channel.updated = Time.now.to_s maker.channel.about = "http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/feeds/news.rss" maker.channel.title = "Example Feed" maker.items.new_item do |item| item.link = "http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2010/12/25/ruby-1-9-2-p136-is-released/" item.title = "Ruby 1.9.2-p136 is released" item.updated = Time.now.to_s end end puts rss
As you can see, this is a very Builder-like DSL. This code will spit out an Atom
feed with one item. If we needed a second item, we’d make another block with maker.items.new_item and build a second one.
Copyright¶ ↑
Copyright © 2003-2007 Kouhei Sutou <kou@cozmixng.org>
You can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Ruby.
There is an additional tutorial by the author of RSS
at: www.cozmixng.org/~rwiki/?cmd=view;name=RSS+Parser%3A%3ATutorial.en
Constants
- AVAILABLE_PARSERS
The list of all available parsers, in constant form.
- AVAILABLE_PARSER_LIBRARIES
The list of all available libraries for parsing.
- CONTENT_PREFIX
The prefix for the Content
XML
namespace.- CONTENT_URI
The
URI
of the Content specification.- DC_PREFIX
The prefix for the Dublin Core
XML
namespace.- DC_URI
The
URI
of the Dublin Core specification.- DublincoreModel
For backward compatibility
- IMAGE_ELEMENTS
This constant holds strings which contain the names of image elements, with the appropriate prefix.
- IMAGE_PREFIX
The prefix for the Image
XML
namespace.- IMAGE_URI
The
URI
for the Image specification.- ITUNES_PREFIX
The prefix for the iTunes
XML
namespace.- ITUNES_URI
The
URI
of the iTunes specification.- SLASH_PREFIX
The prefix for the Slash
XML
namespace.- SLASH_URI
The
URI
of the Slash specification.- SY_PREFIX
The prefix for the Syndication
XML
namespace.- SY_URI
The
URI
of the Syndication specification.- TAXO_ELEMENTS
The listing of all the taxonomy elements, with the appropriate namespace.
- TAXO_PREFIX
The prefix for the Taxonomy
XML
namespace.- TAXO_URI
The
URI
for the specification of the TaxonomyXML
namespace.- URI
- VERSION
The current version of
RSS