# RSS/Atom feed consuming lib? **URL:** \ **Category:** Ruby\ **Created:** [October 18, 2006, 10:13am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rss-atom-feed-consuming-lib/72585 "2006-10-18T10:13:48Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 9\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![pazu](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/p/e9c0ed/32.png) [@pazu](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/pazu)\ **Post date:** [October 18, 2006, 10:13am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rss-atom-feed-consuming-lib/72585/1 "2006-10-18T10:13:48Z")
I have a customer (we build their intranet with Rails) that subscribes to a number of news feeds. They want to make these feeds available on their intranet so we need to fetch, parse and publish these feeds (like a interal web based feed reader). Are there any good Ruby libs to this that preferably supports 0.92, 2.0 and Atom (Atom is more of a nice to have than need to have…) and exposes it with a nice common (for all formats) API? I looked att RAA and Rubyforge but didn’t find anything that really peaked my interest (although I might have missed something) /Marcus ---
**Author:** ![pazu](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/p/e9c0ed/32.png) [@pazu](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/pazu)\ **Post date:** [October 18, 2006, 3:54pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rss-atom-feed-consuming-lib/72585/2 "2006-10-18T15:54:25Z")
On 10/18/06, Marcus B. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > I looked att RAA and Rubyforge but didn’t find anything that really > peaked my interest (although I might have missed something) > > /Marcus I was unable to find anything that really fit my needs either. I’m in the process of hacking one together, but it’s still a ways from being really useful. You can check out FeedTools[1], it seems to have most of the capabilities you’re looking for. I wasn’t able to use if for a few reasons, but maybe it’ll be helpful to you. [1] [http://sporkmonger.com/projects/feedtools/](http://sporkmonger.com/projects/feedtools/) ---
**Author:** ![pazu](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/p/e9c0ed/32.png) [@pazu](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/pazu)\ **Post date:** [October 18, 2006, 4:36pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rss-atom-feed-consuming-lib/72585/3 "2006-10-18T16:36:52Z")
Marcus B. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > Are there any good Ruby libs to this that preferably supports 0.92, > 2.0 and Atom (Atom is more of a nice to have than need to have…) and > exposes it with a nice common (for all formats) API? Yes, syndication[1](http://rubyforge.org/projects/syndication/) and FeedTools[2](http://sporkmonger.com/projects/feedtools/) should be two of the better libraries. HTH, Jochen ---
**Author:** ![pazu](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/p/e9c0ed/32.png) [@pazu](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/pazu)\ **Post date:** [October 18, 2006, 7:36pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rss-atom-feed-consuming-lib/72585/4 "2006-10-18T19:36:03Z")
Thanks for the tips! I’ve tried feedtools and it seems to work nicely 🙂 Out of curiosity: Why couldn’t you use feedtools? /Marcus ---
**Author:** ![pazu](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/p/e9c0ed/32.png) [@pazu](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/pazu)\ **Post date:** [October 18, 2006, 8:44pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rss-atom-feed-consuming-lib/72585/5 "2006-10-18T20:44:49Z")
> Marcus B. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > > > Are there any good Ruby libs to this that preferably supports 0.92, > > 2.0 and Atom (Atom is more of a nice to have than need to have…) and > > exposes it with a nice common (for all formats) API? If you’re planning to go through FeedBurner, you can checkout the plugin at [http://combustible.rubyforge.org/docs](http://combustible.rubyforge.org/docs) Still very young, but perhaps you’ll find it usefull Gustav – about me: My greatest achievement was when all the other kids just learnt to count from 1 to 10, i was counting (0…9) - gustav.paul ---
**Author:** ![pazu](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/p/e9c0ed/32.png) [@pazu](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/pazu)\ **Post date:** [October 18, 2006, 11:25pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rss-atom-feed-consuming-lib/72585/6 "2006-10-18T23:25:33Z")
Marcus B. wrote: > peaked my interest (although I might have missed something) > > /Marcus You may be interested in feed-normalizer; something I pieced together to wrap a few different Atom/RSS parsers. It outputs a normalized object graph to represent a feed, regardless of the underlying feed format. It currently wraps the Ruby RSS parser and Lucas Carlson’s SimpleRSS, but it can be easily extended to support more parsers. Patches welcome. [http://feed-normalizer.rubyforge.org/](http://feed-normalizer.rubyforge.org/) Hope that helps. Andy ---
**Author:** ![pazu](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/p/e9c0ed/32.png) [@pazu](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/pazu)\ **Post date:** [October 18, 2006, 9:10pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rss-atom-feed-consuming-lib/72585/7 "2006-10-18T21:10:57Z")
On 10/18/06, Marcus B. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > Thanks for the tips! I’ve tried feedtools and it seems to work nicely 🙂 > > Out of curiosity: Why couldn’t you use feedtools? > > /Marcus I’m going to be parsing a LOT of feeds, but only for a few specific elements. A few quick tests showed it would probably be too slow for what I need it for. I hadn’t seen syndicate, so I will definitely be checking it, as it seems close to what I need. I could end up using feedtools for generating feeds, but when it comes to consuming it’s just got a bit too much overhead for me. ---
**Author:** ![pazu](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/p/e9c0ed/32.png) [@pazu](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/pazu)\ **Post date:** [October 19, 2006, 11:06am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rss-atom-feed-consuming-lib/72585/8 "2006-10-19T11:06:56Z")
I am also working on a performance app that requires feed parsing. The two that I have tried are feedtools and syndication. First I tried feedtools for RSS and Atom, but that was too slow, so I switched to syndication for both RSS and Atom. I found syndication to break on a high percentage of Atom sites, so in the end, I sent RSS to syndication and Atom to feedtools and took the corresponding perf hit for Atom feeds. I find this approach to be decently robust, but not very elegant. I am going through \> 10k feeds a day of all varieties. Can someone comment on the robustness of Ruby RSS Parser and Lucas Carlson’s SimpleRSS? I am curious about Andy’s feed normalizer. HTH, Ray ---
**Author:** ![pazu](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/p/e9c0ed/32.png) [@pazu](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/pazu)\ **Post date:** [October 20, 2006, 2:00am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rss-atom-feed-consuming-lib/72585/9 "2006-10-20T02:00:10Z")
Ray C. wrote: > I am also working on a performance app that requires feed parsing. As previously mentioned, feed-normalizer aims to produce a ‘Feed’ object that is independent of the underlying format. This means it will use each parser (in a user-defined order) until it gets back a successful parse and usable a object which to interface. What this also means is that the _primary_ goal of feed-normalizer is to produce the aforementioned Feed object graph. This might mean it hitting 3 parsers before it gets that result. So performance isn’t really a consideration. Of course, you could change the order of parsing so that feed-normalizer uses the fastest parser first, and so on. feed-normalizer currently uses most strict to most liberal as its default order. Right now, this just happens to be fastest parser first, too 🙂 > The two that I have tried are feedtools and syndication. First I tried > feedtools for RSS and Atom, but that was too slow, so I switched to > syndication for both RSS and Atom. I found syndication to break on a > high percentage of Atom sites, so in the end, I sent RSS to syndication > and Atom to feedtools and took the corresponding perf hit for Atom > feeds. In this case you could create a wrapper for feed-normalizer that interfaces both syndication and feedtools, and tell feed-normalizer which one to use first. I assume you’ll probably encounter more RSS than Atom. > I find this approach to be decently robust, but not very elegant. I am > going through \> 10k feeds a day of all varieties. > > Can someone comment on the robustness of Ruby RSS Parser and Lucas > Carlson’s SimpleRSS? I am curious about Andy’s feed normalizer. I personally have found Ruby’s RSS library to be very good at handling RSS feeds that aren’t broken 🙂 What that means is the results should be predictable, but the chance of a good parse may be lower. SimpleRSS on the other hand is uber-liberal, and if the feed resembles anywhere near an RSS or Atom document, you’ll probably get a pretty good result back, but there are small errors sometimes. Bob A. did an overview of both parsers, somewhere on [sporkmonger.com](http://sporkmonger.com). Back to performance again; I did some rudimentary benchmarks[1] of both Ruby’s RSS as well as SimpleRSS. I think the results of this benchmark really make the point for SimpleRSS being a great ‘backup’ parser to have when nothing else will parse an ill-formed feed. And of course, I’m always looking for patches and new parser wrappers for feed-normalizer. > HTH, > Ray Hope that helps. Andy [1] > **[textdriven.com - textdriven Resources and Information.](http://ww1.textdriven.com/articles/2006/03/28/parsers-in-the-pool)** > > textdriven.com is your first and best source for all of the information you’re looking for. From general topics to more of what you would expect to find here, textdriven.com has it all. We hope you find what you are searching for!