A new RSS/Atom Parser

From its very beginning until now, newsbeuter has always used libmrss to parse RSS and Atom feeds. But there were a few problems: libmrss (and libnxml, the XML library it builds upon) are both written in pure C. Also, they are quite big (more than 6000 lines of code), and licensed under the LGPL, a license that I don’t really prefer.

So I decided to replace libmrss and libnxml with a self-developed RSS/Atom parser, using libxml2 as its base XML library. While the development of a new RSS/Atom parser isn’t too difficult by itself, it is still not that trivial due to the vast amount of variations of RSS. I already tested it with more than 100 feeds, but I urge everyone to check out the git master branch from newsbeuter’s git repository, compile it, and test it with the feeds that you read. Don’t hesitate to report any issues or irregularities back to me. Every feedback helps with the stability of newsbeuter, and I want to make the new parser as stable as possible before releasing the next version of newsbeuter.

4 Responses to “A new RSS/Atom Parser”

  1. Lee Says:

    Just wanted to let you know, building from source doesn’t build doc/newsbeuter.1 and doc/podbeuter.1, so doing a ./config.sh && make && make install will give errors when install can’t find the man pages to install.

  2. Atsutane Says:

    I face the same error at the laptop, at the desktop it works fine for me. I’m trying to locate the problem in detail[1], by now the workaround is to patch a2x so that it calls xmllint without the –nonet Option.

    [1] http://forum.archlinux.de/?page=Postings;id=20;thread=11023 (German)

  3. Morgan Goose Says:

    I am not getting this blog’s feed to work.

  4. Morgan Goose Says:

    I’ll sumbmit a bug report though, because after editing the config, it loaded. But is giving an error now.

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