NAME

sfeed — RSS and Atom parser

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

sfeed reads RSS or Atom feed data (XML) from stdin. It writes the feed data in a TAB-separated format to stdout. If the baseurl argument is a valid absolute URL then the relative links or enclosures will be made an absolute URL.

TAB-SEPARATED FORMAT FIELDS

The items are output per line in a TAB-separated format.

For the fields title, id and author each whitespace character is replaced by a SPACE character. Control characters are removed.

The content field can contain newlines and these are escaped. TABs, newlines and '\' are escaped with '\', so it becomes: '\t', '\n' and '\\'. Other whitespace characters except spaces are removed. Control characters are removed.

The order and content of the fields are:

1. timestamp

UNIX timestamp in UTC+0, empty if missing or on a parse failure.

2. title

Title text, HTML code in titles is ignored and is treated as plain-text.

3. link

Link

4. content

Content, can have plain-text or HTML code depending on the content-type field.

5. content-type

"html" or "plain" if it has content.

6. id

RSS item GUID or Atom id.

7. author

Item, first author.

8. enclosure

Item, first enclosure.

9. category

Item, categories, multiple values are separated by the '|' character.

EXIT STATUS

The sfeed utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs.

EXAMPLES

curl -s 'https://codemadness.org/atom.xml' | sfeed

To convert the character set from a feed that is not UTF-8 encoded the iconv(1) tool can be used:

curl -s 'https://codemadness.org/some_iso-8859-1_feed.xml' | \
iconv -f iso-8859-1 -t utf-8 | \
sfeed

EXAMPLE SETUP

1. Create a directory for the sfeedrc configuration and the feeds:

mkdir -p ~/.sfeed/feeds

2. Copy the example sfeedrc(5) configuration:

cp sfeedrc.example ~/.sfeed/sfeedrc
$EDITOR ~/.sfeed/sfeedrc

Or import existing OPML subscriptions using sfeed_opml_import(1):

sfeed_opml_import < file.opml > ~/.sfeed/sfeedrc

3. To update feeds and merge the new items with existing items:

sfeed_update

4. Format feeds to a plain-text list:

sfeed_plain ~/.sfeed/feeds/*

Or format feeds to a curses interface:

sfeed_curses ~/.sfeed/feeds/*

There are also other formatting programs included. The README file has more examples.

SEE ALSO

sfeed_curses(1), sfeed_opml_import(1), sfeed_plain(1), sfeed_update(1), sfeed(5), sfeedrc(5)

AUTHORS

Hiltjo Posthuma <hiltjo@codemadness.org>

CAVEATS

If a timezone for the timestamp field is not in the RFC 822 or RFC 3339 format it is not supported and the timezone is interpreted as UTC+0.