The universal feedparser

Sometimes things don't have to be difficult. For example, incorporating a RSS feed summary in another website. With the universal feedparser this takes only a few lines of code.

The universal feedparser is a old but venerable piece of software that makes it a walk in the park to retrieve information from an RSS or Atom feed in Python.

The following code is what I actually use to incorporate the title and first paragraph of the postings on this blog on my homepage.

view plainprint?

1. import feedparser  
2. import re  
3.   
4. firstp=re.compile(r'^.*?<p>(.*?)</p>')  
5.   
6. url="http://michelanders.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default"  
7. feed=feedparser.parse(url)  
8.   
9. print '<h2><a href="%s">%s</a></h2>'%(feed.feed.link,feed.feed.title)  
10. print '<div class="feeditemlist">'  
11. for e in feed.entries:  
12.         mo=firstp.search(e.description)  
13.         short=mo.group(1) if not mo is None else 'no summary available'  
14.         date="-".join(map(str,e.updated_parsed[:3]))  
15.         summary='<p>%s</p><a href="%s">read more</a>'%(short,e.link)  
16.         print ''''' 
17.         <h3><a href="#"> 
18.         <span class="feeditemdate">%s</span> 
19.         <span class="feeditemtitle">%s</span> 
20.         </a></h3> 
21.         <div class="feeditemsummary">%s</div>'''%(date,e.title,summary)  
22. print '</div>'  

import feedparser
import re

firstp=re.compile(r'^.*?<p>(.*?)</p>')

url="http://michelanders.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default"
feed=feedparser.parse(url)

print '<h2><a href="%s">%s</a></h2>'%(feed.feed.link,feed.feed.title)
print '<div class="feeditemlist">'
for e in feed.entries:
        mo=firstp.search(e.description)
        short=mo.group(1) if not mo is None else 'no summary available'
        date="-".join(map(str,e.updated_parsed[:3]))
        summary='<p>%s</p><a href="%s">read more</a>'%(short,e.link)
        print '''
        <h3><a href="#">
        <span class="feeditemdate">%s</span>
        <span class="feeditemtitle">%s</span>
        </a></h3>
        <div class="feeditemsummary">%s</div>'''%(date,e.title,summary)
print '</div>'

The html this script produces is easily readable by itself but can simply be converted to a jQueryUI Accordion widget to save space.

The only drawback is that the universal feed parser only works with Python 2.x