Greetings fellow people of suckless,
I would like to announce a simple RSS and Atom parser and reader I've
been working on.
Some of the current features are:
- items are stored in a format to easily interact with, so I used a
TSV-like format.
- separate programs to display this data (sfeed_plain (plain-text),
sfeed_html (HTML)).
- relatively little dependencies (although I use libexpat to parse XML).
- simple to interact with and play nice with existing tools (works
great with dmenu, links and your trusty term).
- works on most platforms (works on Linux, OpenBSD, Cygwin etc).
- easy to sync your feeds TO THE CLOUD ;P
- parallel downloading of feeds (sfeed_update).
- time conversion to your timezone.
Programs included and purpose of each program
---------------------------------------------
Name Purpose
sfeed - read XML RSS or Atom feed data from stdin. Write feed data
in tab-separated format to stdout.
sfeed_update - Shellscript; update feeds and merge with old feeds in the
file $HOME/.sfeed/feeds by default.
sfeed_plain - Format feeds file (TSV) from sfeed_update to plain text.
sfeed_html - Format feeds file (TSV) from sfeed_update to HTML.
sfeed_opml_import - Generate a sfeedrc config file based on an opml file.
sfeed_opml_export - Generate an opml file based on a sfeedrc config file.
Example output of format programs
---------------------------------
Example output of sfeed_plain:
http://www.codemadness.nl/downloads/projects/sfeed/EXAMPLE.txt
Example output of sfeed_html:
http://www.codemadness.nl/downloads/projects/sfeed/EXAMPLE.html
Screenshot of sfeed_plain with dmenu (see usage examples):
http://www.codemadness.nl/downloads/screenshots/sfeed-screenshot.png
TAB-SEPARATED format
--------------------
The items are saved in a TSV-like format except newlines, tabs and
backslash are escaped with \ (\n, \t and \\). Other whitespace except
spaces are removed.
The timestamp field is converted to a unix timestamp. The timestamp is also
stored as formatted as a separate field. The other fields are left untouched
(including HTML).
The order and format of the fields are:
item unix timestamp - string unix timestamp (GMT+0)
item formatted timestamp - string timestamp (YYYY-mm-dd HH:MM:SS tz[+-]HHMM)
item title - string
item link - string
item description - string
item contenttype - string ("html" or "plain")
item id - string
item author - string
feed type - string ("rss" or "atom")
feed name - string (extra field added by sfeed_update)
feed url - string (extra field added by sfeed_update)
item baseurl site - string (extra field added by sfeed_update)
Some usage examples
-------------------
Basic usage to get items from a single newsfeed which also explains
the design of sfeed (iconv is optional, it's only used if feeds are
non-UTF8 encoded):
curl -s 'http://kernel.org/kdist/rss.xml' | iconv -cs -f "iso-8859-1"
-t "utf-8" | sfeed | sfeed_plain
Config file syntax (shell script) for sfeed_update:
feeds() {
# feed <name> <feedurl> [basesiteurl] [encoding]
feed "codemadness" "http://www.codemadness.nl/blog/rss.xml"; &
feed "xkcd" "http://xkcd.com/atom.xml"; &
feed "linux kernel" "http://kernel.org/kdist/rss.xml";
"http://kernel.org"; "iso-8859-1" &
}
update items and merge (default config location is $HOME/.sfeed/sfeedrc).
sfeed_update
format feeds to plain-text:
sfeed_plain < $HOME/.sfeed/feeds > $HOME/.sfeed/feeds.txt
format feeds to HTML:
sfeed_html < $HOME/.sfeed/feeds > $HOME/.sfeed/feeds.html
view feeds with dmenu, opens selected url in $BROWSER:
url=$(sfeed_plain < "$HOME/.sfeed/feeds" | dmenu -l 35 -i |
sed 's@^.* \([a-zA-Z]*://\)\(.*\)$@\1\2@')
[ ! "$url" = "" ] && $BROWSER "$url"
Generate a sfeedrc config file from your exported list of feeds in opml
format (newsbeuter, google reader, snownews, thunderbird, etc):
sfeed_opml_import < opmlfile.xml > $HOME/.sfeed/sfeedrc
Export an opml file of your feeds from a sfeedrc config file:
sfeed_opml_export configfile > myfeeds.opml
This is the first version I publicly share with people so I'm sure
there are some bugs. Patches, bug reports and constructive criticism
are very welcome.
You can get the latest code with git at:
git clone
http://www.codemadness.nl/downloads/projects/sfeed/src/sfeed.git
A direct link to the latest README with more information is available here:
http://www.codemadness.nl/downloads/projects/sfeed/README
Link to blog with some screenshot and example files:
http://www.codemadness.nl/blog/2011/04/01/sfeed-simple-feed-parser/
Credits
Thanks to raph_ael on #suckless for the idea of an opml converter and
__20h__ for suggesting I should add a public code repo for easier
patch management.
Kind regards,
Hiltjo (Evil_Bob on #suckless)
