Skip to content Skip to sidebar Skip to footer
Home / Api / Atom Feed / Feed / Python / Rss

Automatically Extracting Feed Links (atom, Rss,etc) From Webpages

Post a Comment
I have a huge list of URLs and my task is to feed them to a python script which should spit out the feed urls if there are any. Is there an API library or code out there that can h

Solution 1:

There's feedfinder:

>>>import feedfinder>>>>>>feedfinder.feed('scripting.com')
'http://scripting.com/rss.xml'
>>>>>>feedfinder.feeds('scripting.com')
['http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/atom.xml', 
 'http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/index.rdf', 
 'http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/rss.xml']
>>>

Solution 2:

I second waffle paradox in recommending Beautiful Soup for parsing the HTML and then getting the <link > tags, where the feeds are referenced. The code I usually use:

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup as parser

defdetect_feeds_in_HTML(input_stream):
    """ examines an open text stream with HTML for referenced feeds.

    This is achieved by detecting all ``link`` tags that reference a feed in HTML.

    :param input_stream: an arbitrary opened input stream that has a :func:`read` method.
    :type input_stream: an input stream (e.g. open file or URL)
    :return: a list of tuples ``(url, feed_type)``
    :rtype: ``list(tuple(str, str))``
    """# check if really an input streamifnothasattr(input_stream, "read"):
        raise TypeError("An opened input *stream* should be given, was %s instead!" % type(input_stream))
    result = []
    # get the textual data (the HTML) from the input stream
    html = parser(input_stream.read())
    # find all links that have an "" attribute
    feed_urls = html.findAll("link", )
    # extract URL and typefor feed_link in feed_urls:
        url = feed_link.get("href", None)
        # if a valid URL is thereif url:
            result.append(url)
    return result

Solution 3:

I don't know any existing library, but Atom or RSS feeds are usually indicated with a <link> tag in the <head> section as such:

<link rel="alternative"type="application/rss+xml" href="http://link.to/feed">
<link rel="alternative"type="application/atom+xml" href="http://link.to/feed">

Straightforward way would be downloading and parsing these URL's with an HTML parser like lxml.html and getting the href attribute of relevant <link> tags.

Solution 4:

Depending on how well-formed the information in these feeds are (e.g., Are all the links in the form of http://.../? Do you know if they will all be in href or link tags? Are all the links in the feeds going to be to other feeds? etc.), I'd recommend anything from a simple regex to a straight-up parsing module to extract links from the feeds.

As far as parsing modules go, I can only recommend beautiful soup. Though even the best parser will only go so far--esp in the case I mentioned above, if you can't guarantee all links in the data are going to be links to other feeds; then you have to do some additional crawling and probing on your own.

Post a Comment for "Automatically Extracting Feed Links (atom, Rss,etc) From Webpages"