A simple, flexible, extensible, and liberal RSS and Atom reader for Ruby with zero dependencies.
SimpleRSS is a Ruby library for parsing RSS and Atom feeds. It provides a simple, flexible, and extensible interface to read feed data, handle malformed XML gracefully, and includes built-in HTTP fetching with conditional GET support. It solves the problem of reliably consuming diverse and often imperfect web feeds in Ruby applications.
Ruby developers building applications that need to consume RSS or Atom feeds, such as content aggregators, news readers, or podcast clients.
Developers choose SimpleRSS for its zero dependencies, liberal parsing of real-world feeds, built-in fetching with bandwidth-efficient polling, and modern features like JSON/XML serialization and an Enumerable interface.
A simple, flexible, extensible, and liberal RSS and Atom reader for Ruby. It is designed to be backwards compatible with the standard RSS parser, but will never do RSS generation.
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Uses regex-based parsing to handle malformed XML common in real-world feeds, ensuring robust consumption without breaking on errors, as highlighted in the README's emphasis on graceful handling.
Built-in URL fetching with conditional GET support via ETag and Last-Modified headers reduces bandwidth usage by skipping unchanged feeds, demonstrated by the fetch method returning nil for 304 responses.
Zero runtime dependencies simplify installation and avoid conflicts, making it easy to integrate into any Ruby project, as stated explicitly in the features list.
Provides an Enumerable interface for natural iteration and filtering, plus RBS type annotations for Ruby 3.1+, enhancing developer productivity and code clarity.
Allows exporting feeds to JSON or clean RSS 2.0/Atom XML with to_json and to_xml methods, facilitating integration with web APIs or standardized feed generation.
The regex-based approach, while tolerant, might misinterpret complex XML structures or namespaces, leading to potential inaccuracies for valid feeds compared to strict parsers.
Lacks built-in support for advanced feed formats like comprehensive Podcast RSS or media handling, requiring manual extension via tag definitions for such use cases.
As a smaller library, it has fewer third-party integrations and community resources than alternatives, which could slow troubleshooting or feature development.
Liberal parsing can introduce unnecessary processing for well-formed feeds, where a stricter parser might be faster, and built-in fetching may not scale for bulk operations.