Aaron Swartz has been looking for an ultra-liberal RSS parser. Now that I’m experimenting with a homegrown RSS-to-email news aggregator, so am I. You see, most RSS feeds suck. Invalid characters, unescaped ampersands (Blogger feeds), invalid entities (Radio feeds), unescaped and invalid HTML (The Register’s feed most days). Or just a bastardized mix of RSS 0.9x elements with RSS 1.0 elements (Movable Type feeds).
Then there are feeds, like Aaron’s feed, which are too bleeding edge. He puts an excerpt in the description element but puts the full text in the content:encoded element (as CDATA). This is valid RSS 1.0, but nobody actually uses it (except Aaron), few news aggregators support it, and many parsers choke on it. Other parsers are confused by the new elements (guid) in RSS 0.94 (see Dave Winer’s feed for an example). And then there’s Jon Udell’s feed, with the fullitem element that he just sort of made up.
rssparser.py. GPL-licensed. Tested on 5000 active feeds.
