Working with Hashnode RSS feed in Python

In article, we will be seeing how extract feed and posts details using RSS feed for a Hashnode blog. Although we are going to use it for blogs on [Hashnode] it can be used for other feeds as well

What is RSS?

RSS stands for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication and uses standard web feed formats to publish frequently updated information: blog entries, news headlines, audio, video.

An RSS document (called “feed”, “web feed”, or “channel”) includes full or summarized text, and metadata, like publishing date and author’s name.

With RSS it is possible to distribute up-to-date web content from one web site to thousands of other web sites around the world.

It is written in XML.

The most commonly used elements in RSS feeds are “title”, “link”, “description”, “publication date”, and “entry ID”.

The less commonnly used elements are “image”, “categories”, “enclosures” and “cloud”.

Why use RSS?

RSS was designed to show selected data.

Without RSS, users will have to check your site daily for new updates. This may be too time-consuming for many users. With an RSS feed (RSS is often called a News feed or RSS feed) they can check your site faster using an RSS aggregator (a site or program that gathers and sorts out RSS feeds).

Parsing feeds with Feedparser

Feedparser is a Python library that parses feeds in all known formats, including Atom, RSS, and RDF.

Installing feed parser

pip install feedparser

getting rss feed

blog_feed = feedparser.parse("https://vaibhavkumar.hashnode.dev/rss.xml")

title of feed

blog_feed.feed.title

link of feed

blog_feed.feed.link

number of posts/entries

len(blog_feed.entries)

Each entry in the feed is a dictionary. Use [0] to print the first entry.

print(blog_feed.entries[0].title)
print(blog_feed.entries[0].link)
print(blog_feed.entries[0].author)
print(blog_feed.entries[0].published)

gettings tags and authors

tags = [tag.term for tag in blog_feed.entries[0].tags]
authors= [author.name for author in blog_feed.entries[0].authors]

Other attributes

blog_feed.version

Putting it together

Now use the above code to write a function which takes link of RSS feed and return the details.

def get_posts_details(rss=None):
    """
    Take link of rss feed as argument
    """
    if rss is not None:
        import feedparser
        blog_feed = blog_feed = feedparser.parse(rss)

        posts = blog_feed.entries
        posts_details = {"Blog title" : blog_feed.feed.title,
                        "Blog link" : blog_feed.feed.link}
        post_list = []
        for post in posts:
            temp = dict()
            try:
                temp["title"] =post.title
                temp["link"] =post.link
                temp["author"] =post.author
                temp["time_published"] = post.published
                temp["tags"] = [tag.term for tag in post.tags]
                temp["authors"] = [author.name for author in post.authors]
                temp["summary"] = post.summary
            except:
                pass
            post_list.append(temp)
        posts_details["posts"] = post_list
        return posts_details
    else:
        return None

Output:

import json

blog_rss = "https://vaibhavkumar.hashnode.dev/rss.xml"

data = get_posts_details(rss = blog_rss)

print(json.dumps(data, indent=2))

Using this one can quickly get the posts lists, links and other details. Also once we have all the posts links, we can crawl them one by one and scraping details like number of likes, comments on each individual posts.

Also, we can use this to expose the details via JSON based APIs.

Try it, with your own blog's RSS feed link.

Thanks for reading. Do give your suggestions and feedback down in the comments.