One of the great benefits of open source is that for some of the problems you encounter, someone probably already solved it for you.
For a project I needed a simple way to parse an RSS feed. If you look around, you’ll find plenty of libraries that designed to tackle this problem.
But taking a closer look at them revealed that most of these libraries have a lot of external dependencies and most offered features weren’t needed. Heck, I just want to parse a feed.
Ruby standard library
What might come in as a surprise is that ruby comes with its own RSS library.
I haven’t looked at all the features, but it seems pretty complete, offering parsing for RSS, Atom and even Itunes Channel XML.
You can parse and iterate a feed like this:
require 'rss'
rss = RSS::Parser.parse('http://www.michaelrigart.be/en/blog.rss', false)
rss.items.each do |item|
puts "#{item.pubDate} - #{item.title}"
end
Keep in mind that the available data can be different between an RSS and Atom feed. If you don’t know which type your are parsing, try checking the .feed_type:
require 'rss'
rss = RSS::Parser.parse('http://www.someatomfeed.org/blog.atom', false)
case rss.feed_type
when 'rss'
rss.items.each { |item| puts item.title }
when 'atom'
rss.items.each { |item| puts item.title.content }
end
The above is just a very basic example, but you get the idea. So why use a 3rd party library when you can do the same with functionality provided from the ruby standard library.