#100DaysOfCode in Python Transcripts
Chapter: Days 52-54: Parsing RSS feeds with Feedparser
Lecture: Concepts: what did we learn
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And that's it, I told you it was simple. So Feedparser is awesome. A very, very simple and small lightweight thing to use
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but really helps you out if you want to automate things like feeds. So, let's just recap quickly what we did without going into too much detail.
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We import requests and this is for pulling down the XML feed. Okay. Specify the feed that we want to pull down, okay.
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We actually get the feed using that URL and we store it in r. Okay. We then open a file, you can call this whatever you want,
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and then we write the contents of that XML file, that feed, into the file that you specified there, okay. Simple. And now, onto the Feedparser stuff.
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So obviously the first thing we do is import feedparser. Okay. Then we specify that actual file that we created in the last step.
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Okay, remember we separated these two processes of pulling the file and then parsing it just in case you had
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a scenario where, let's say you couldn't pull the file. Well, if you couldn't pull it, at least you have
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an existing file and you can continue parsing that. The whole thing doesn't fall over, alright. Now we parse it using feedparser.parse and throw that
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into the feed, all right. And then we have the little sanity check there to make sure the feed is okay to parse,
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that it has that title tag that we want and that we did necessary again. You can wrap some sort of a try except or whatever
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you know, error checking you want around that. Then for every entry within that feed we're going to take
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the data stored against publish in the publish tag, in the title tag and the link tag and then we're going to print that in a nice little string
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and that's it, okay. Now, very exciting. It's your turn. So for the next day I would like you, instead of printing out that data,
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so in the previous step you saw we printed out the publish, the title and the link. Instead of printing it out,
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why not do something interesting with it? What can you think that you might be able to do with it? So just some ideas, maybe you could e-mail that data
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which is exactly what I'm doing with this steam stuff. That's the script I'm running. You could e-mail that to yourself.
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You could potentially store it in a database. There's a nice little challenge for you. You figure out a way to store that data in a database.
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Or you could just think of something else. Anything you can think of, any other libraries that you could use to do something interesting with that.
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Come up with it, try your own feed and have fun with it and go parse those feeds.