rss2text

Takes a feed and optional format string, and prints for every new entry.

USAGE

    ./rss2text.pl URL
    ./rss2text.pl --format "__title__: __link__" URL

SYNOPSIS

    ./rss2text [options] URL

    Options:
      -f, --format          template string for returning results.
      -[no]c, --[no]cache   enables/disables cache.
      -i, --input           pass a file of URLs to download or "-" for STDIN
      --cache_dir           location of the cache directory.
      --cookie_path         path to a cookie to send with the request
      -d, --debug           print the path to the cache file
      -w, --workers         change number of workers

OPTIONS

• -f format string, --format=format string

  The format string dictates how rss2text returns your data. It can include any static text you'd like along with placeholders, which use double underscores to separate themselves. A placeholder looks like __name__ and will be substituted with the child element of the feed entry.

  The format string can take any child elements that belong in an entry. Typical placeholders include "title", "description", "published", "link", and "author". Printing the title of every link is achieved by passing in the format string as "__title__". If you want to print the title, a colon and a single space, and then the link, simply pass "__title__: __link__".

  You can request anything you'd like if you know that a feed will have the item you're requesting. If it's not there, you'll get a big pretty message placeholder in your output:

    TAG "thing" UNDEFINED
  

  The default value is "__link__".

• -[no]c, --[no]cache

  The cache option enables or disables the cache. rss2text caches the date of the latest entry it last saw, along with any HTTP caching headers it saw (ETag and Last-Modified values).

  The default value is to cache.

• -i filename, --input=filename

  The location of a file that contains a newline-separated list of URLs to pull. The filename can also be "-", in which case STDIN will be used to read URLs. You don't have to pass a URL on the command line if you use this option. If you do, those URLs will be appeneded to the list. This functionality is mimicked from wget.

• --cache_dir

  This option specifies the directory in which to store cached information. This option does nothing if caching is disabled.

  The default location for the cache is under /tmp/rss2text

• --cookie_path

  Specifies the location of a cookie to be sent along with the request. The cookie must be saved in Netscape format (or more usefully: the format that "curl" saves cookies in.)

  rss2text by default does not send any cookie along with requests.

• -d, --debug

  Debug will take the given URL(s) and print the location of the file on disk containing the cached information. This option overrides the others.

• -w, --workers

  Change the number of workers used to grab URLs. Defaults to 10.

DESCRIPTION

rss2text takes a feed and an optional format string, grabs the feed and loops over the returned entries, printing what was requested in the format string. It's like printf for RSS feeds and is particularly useful for one-liners and other places where you need a textual interface.

rss2text will, by default, try to cache as much information as possible in order to prevent displaying entries that were seen on a previous run. This makes rss2text especially useful for cronjobs.

DEPENDENCIES

rss2text is written in perl and uses LWP::UserAgent to grab feeds, XML::FeedPP for parsing feeds, DateTime::Format::W3CDTF to parse dates, and Try::Tiny to make sure DateTime::Format::W3CDTF doesn't kill the program. It will make use of HTTP::Cookies::Netscape if you ask it to send a cookie with a request.

rss2text uses POE to help grab feeds more quickly.

Debian has packages available for each:

    apt-get install libwww-perl libxml-feedpp-perl libdatetime-format-w3cdtf-perl libtry-tiny-perl libhttp-cookies-perl libpoe-perl

rss2text uses perl 5.10.0. Older perls can be used, but you'll have to do the say/print-newline dance yourself.

EXAMPLES

    # print a list of new links from the feed
    ./rss2text.pl http://www.schwertly.com/feed/

    # print a list of titles from the feed without using the cache
    ./rss2text.pl --nocache -f "__title__" http://www.schwertly.com/feed/

    # print the title, a newline, then tab in, then the link
    ./rss2text.pl -f "__title__\n\t__link__" http://www.schwertly.com/feed/

    # pull updates for all of your blogs with perl in the URL
    grep -i perl urls.txt | ./rss2text.pl -i -

AUTHOR

Stan Schwertly (http://www.schwertly.com)