feedparser attribute error

Question

I'm trying to retrieve some news from the BBC rss feed and save certain parts locally in xml (althought this code only prints it). I seem to be able to retrieve everything I want except for the pubDate. I get the error

"File "/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/feedparser.py", line 416, in __getattr__
raise AttributeError, "object has no attribute '%s'" % key
AttributeError: object has no attribute 'pubDate'"

I'm not sure why as everything else I've wanted to retrieve hasn't caused any problems. Here is the code:

import feedparser
import xml.etree.cElementTree as ET
from xml.dom import minidom

BBCHome = feedparser.parse ('http://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/rss.xml')


def prettify(elem):

    rough_string = ET.tostring(elem, 'utf-8')
    reparsed = minidom.parseString(rough_string)
    return reparsed.toprettyxml(indent="  ")

root = ET.Element('root')

for story in BBCHome.entries:
    item = ET.SubElement(root,'item')
    title = ET.SubElement(item,'title')
    title.text = story.title
    # why doesn't pubDate work?
    pubDate = ET.SubElement (item,'pubDate')
    pubDate.text = story.pubDate
    description = ET.SubElement(item,'description')
    description.text = story.description
    link = ET.SubElement(item,'link')
    link.text = story.link
    print prettify(root)

Reading this page : https://pythonhosted.org/feedparser/namespace-handling.html I think it might have something to do with namespaces but tbh I don't really understand. I've looked at the raw feed and it seems like just another sub element of item similar to description or title.

If I could find out how to fix this and why it wasn't working it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Maybe if you `print story` then you get what is inside - maybe it has different name. — furas, Jul 06 '14 at 23:02

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 06 '14 at 23:05

3

I print story.keys() and I got only.

['summary_detail', 'published_parsed', 'links', 'title', 'media_thumbnail',
 'summary', 'guidislink', 'title_detail', 'href', 'link', 'published', 'id']

Maybe story.published is what you need.

answered Jul 06 '14 at 23:05

furas

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Exactly what I needed. Thank you. For some reason I thought that the sub element names in the feed would be the same as what I needed to retrieve – user3050397 Jul 06 '14 at 23:07

feedparser attribute error

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