Feed Duck

This gem wraps the default RSS::Parser lib from Ruby and provides an uniform interface (therefore the "duck") for reading data from Atom and RSS feeds (therefore the "feed").

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'feed_duck'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install feed_duck

Usage

Basic usage

Feed duck is meant to be used just like RSS:Parser. It expects the feed XML as an argument(either from a file or, like in most cases, from a URL), and returns a FeedDuck::Feed object with the parsed data. Let's see an example:

require 'feed_duck'
require 'uri'

url = 'http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/feeds/news.rss'
open(url) do |feed|
  feed = FeedDuck::Parser.parse(feed)
  
  feed.title
  # => "Ruby News"
  
  feed.entries.first.title
  # => Ruby 2.1.2 is released
end

Conversely, if you'd like to read an Atom feed, the interface is exactly the same.

require 'feed_duck'
require 'uri'

url = 'http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/feeds/news.atom'
open(url) do |feed|
  feed = FeedDuck::Parser.parse(feed)
  
  feed.title
  # => "Ruby News"
  
  feed.entries.first.title
  # => Ruby 2.1.2 is released
end

Providing the same interface for both standards is where this gem really shines. If you were to read an entry's published date in a RSS feed using the standard Ruby lib, this is what you'd have to do:

feed.channel.items.first.pubDate
# => 2014-05-13 22:25:02 -0300

If this was an Atom feed, the interface would be very different:

feed.entries.first.updated.content
# => 2014-05-13 22:25:02 -0300

Now using feed duck, for either an Atom or RSS feed:

feed.entries.first.published_at
# => 2014-05-13 22:25:02 -0300

Available methods:

Feed Duck's interface was designed to be minimal. Here are the available methods:

title: Feed title
url: Feed URL
description: Feed short description
entries: An array containing each entry from the feed.

Each entry also provides:

title: Entry's title
content: The entry content itself.
published_at: Date of publication or last update.
author: Author's name
url: Permalink to this post
id: Unique post ID.

If for some reason you need other methods, feel free to fork the project, add them and send me a pull request. You can also ask me, but I cannot promise anything :)

to_h

Feed duck is compliant with the Ruby 2.0 standard to_h inteface for converting an object to a Hash:

feed.to_h
# => {
#     title: "Example Feed",
#     url: "http://example.org/",
#     subtitle: "A subtitle.",
#     description: "A subtitle.",
#     entries: [{
#       title: "Atom-Powered Robots Run Amok",
#       content: "Some interesting content.",
#       published_at: Time.utc(2003, 12, 13, 18, 30, 02),
#       author: "John Doe",
#       url: "http://example.org/2003/12/13/atom03",
#       id: "urn:uuid:1225c695-cfb8-4ebb-aaaa-80da344efa6a"
#     }]
# }

You can also generate hashes of individual entries:

feed.entry.first.to_h
# => {
#       title: "Atom-Powered Robots Run Amok",
#       content: "Some interesting content.",
#       published_at: Time.utc(2003, 12, 13, 18, 30, 02),
#       author: "John Doe",
#       url: "http://example.org/2003/12/13/atom03",
#       id: "urn:uuid:1225c695-cfb8-4ebb-aaaa-80da344efa6a"
#    }
# }

Contributing

Fork it ( https://github.com/abernardes/feed_duck/fork )
Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
Create a new Pull Request

feed_duck