Detect and Parse Atom and RSS Feed URLs from HTML with TruffleHog

TruffleHog is a small library I wrote for detecting and parsing Atom and RSS feeds in a web page. I'm sure there are other libraries out there, but I couldn't find one easily. I found Cory Forsyth's FeedDetector, but there were some cases that it didn't handle.

Anyway, here is everything you need to get running.

gem install truffle-hog --source http://gemcutter.org

# and then in teh rubys
require 'rubygems'
require 'truffle-hog'

# get atom and rss
feed_urls = TruffleHog.parse_feed_urls(some_html)

# get atom if available, otherwise rss
feed_urls = TruffleHog.parse_feed_urls(some_html, :atom)

# get rss if available, otherwise atom
feed_urls = TruffleHog.parse_feed_urls(some_html, :rss)

Behind the scenes it's grabbing the urls through a regex. Really just a few lines of code. I may update it with some fancy Nokogiri parsing and some other stuff, but for now it's just a simple way to parse out feed urls.

Comments

[Denis Barushev]

Are you know about jnunemaker-columbus?

It does GET the url as well as follows redirects.

[Paul Dix]

I didn't. However, doing the GET is exactly what I didn't want. I don't want my parsing code mixed in with the HTTP code.

I probably would have used something else if I could find it. I just didn't turn anything up on a search.

[Quinn Shanahan]

I have heard of people using the google reader api to do feed discovery on a given url. Might be worth looking into.