Using Ruby to Stay Informed With Innovative Thought

So I was thinking this evening about creating an RSS parser in Ruby. You know… Ruby supports this built in? Big surprise right? All you have to do in require the rss library:

require 'rss'

Then of course if you want to open up a connection to a URL you need to include the open uri library too:

require 'open-uri'

So that’s all the requirements. Next I’ll create a method called ReadRss that will take a single variable defined as “url”.

def ReadRss(url)
  open(url) do |page|
    respond = page.read
    result = RSS::Parser.parse(respond,false)
    puts "Blog: #{result.channel.title}, #{result.channel.description}"
    result.items.each_with_index do |item, i|
      i += 1
      puts "#{i}  #{item.title}"
    end
  end
end

That’s it. Now all you have to do is call ReadRss with the site feed address. Here’s a good hint for you:

ReadRss("https://innovativethought.wordpress.com/feed/")

So now that you can parse RSS feeds right from your Ruby script.  ATOM parser will come shortly.