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Working on a [rails] project, I've started playing around with RSS parsing. I notice that there are TONS of feed parsers out there, and different folks have their preferences. Naturally, one of the first places I looked was http://ruby-toolbox.com/categories/rss_feed_parsing.html.

Feedzirra seems to be the choice amongst most I've read about, but I did noticed that it looks a bit dated. I don't necessarily have a problem with that. Heck, if he knocked it out of the park, its gone :).

To that end, I quickly found the Ruby Standard Library RSS. My first thought was "well, if its built into the library, its probably what I'm looking for..." My second thought was "where the crap is the documentation?"

So, where do I go from here? I know that often times there are no stone-set right answers for a problem, and the specifics of a problem can dictate the best answer...

What's the currently accepted defacto RSS parsing library? If its not the build in library, why? I'd love to hear thoughts and get insight... Maybe I have grossly overlooked some information online...

P.S. I didn't miss Ruby RSS. It just didn't seem like enough information...

Iamvery
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RSS is just XML. I just use Nokogiri to parse the feeds, usually. For creating RSS feeds, I simply have HAML views that render to the proper XML. No need for a super specialized RSS library.

Chris Heald
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  • I second that. Nokogiri is great, and it's well documented. – Eric R. Jul 15 '11 at 21:44
  • My experience with PHP & Java is that a RSS parsing tool can help to process the different types of feeds RSS (and what about Atom?). Secondly, feeds mix different types of encoding and mime types for the data, which makes it hard to extract information directly from the XML in a uniform way. A separate tool can hide the complexity to handle this. – Kwebble Jul 17 '11 at 18:05
  • Do you have any input as to why the standard Ruby RSS library is not recommended? Is it simply lack of documentation? – Iamvery Aug 03 '11 at 16:16