#100DaysOfCode in Python Transcripts
Chapter: Days 52-54: Parsing RSS feeds with Feedparser
Lecture: Feedparser Sanity Check
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Okay, one last little thing for you
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which is a bit of a best practice
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as always with Python scripts, you would
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normally put in some sort of an error check,
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just to make sure or a conditional check,
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just to make sure everything is in place
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before you run your script, right.
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So in this case, what happens if one
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of these tags doesn't exist in the feed?
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Well, sometimes these RSS feeds out there
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don't always include the default tags,
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like title and link or description
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or whatever else, okay, if that happens
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well then your script's going to break.
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So you should try and capture those errors
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but right now, I'm not going to walk you
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through error catching and testing
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and trying except and everything that's
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another module in itself, right.
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So what I will show is just a really
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quick, if statement that just works, okay.
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So you could do if and then your tag name,
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now I would definitely insist on title being in there,
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so if title in feed.entries, we're looking at the
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first item in feed.entries there.
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Then we want you to run the full loop and that's it,
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okay, that's all I'm looking at now then you can put
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ls break or something like that or you could run your
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try and except and what if you want to wrap around it.
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But in this case, that's all we need, so we can save that
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and then we can run that, so Python
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and we'll get the same output as last time.
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Okay, we can go and see all of that data
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now just to prove that this actually worked,
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here's what we can do, let's clear and let's
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change the actual tag we're looking for.
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So let's come up with something that's
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definitely not going to be in there.
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Let's see if I can spell, so that should be in every feed
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right but unfortunately not so if Julian rocks
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in feed.entries then run your forward.
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Okay, let's run that and bang, nothing
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happened, let's put title back in and there we have it,
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okay, so that's it if you want to do some
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sort of testing against it before you run
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it, well that's the way to do it.
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Okay, and that's pretty much feed parser nice and simple.
