dive into mark

Fredrik Lundh: The EffNews Project: Building an RSS Newsreader. In Python. A HOWTO, written by the same guy who wrote Python’s regular expression engine. But EffNews will not be using regular expressions, of course; it will be using an XML parser. (Lots of luck with that.) Although for reasons that are not entirely clear, it appears to be using xmllib. I say that because xmllib has been deprecated for years (specifically, since the release of Python 2.0, on October 16, 2000) in favor of xml.sax. A lot of hosting sites still only offer Python 1.5.2, though, since there were some licensing issues surrounding Python 1.6 and 2.0.0, and I think it wasn’t included in some Linux distributions for a while. Ah, the ripples of history…

Update: as it clearly states in Part 2: Fetching and Parsing RSS Data, For the first version of the RSS parser, we’ll use the xmllib parser. You can plug in another parser if you need more features or better performance (and as you’ll see, chances are that you need more, or at least different features. More later). So I’ll just have to wait for part 3, I guess. (In case you missed it, Part 1: Fetching RSS Files goes into amazing depth on the little-understood asyncore module.)

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