@hughrun/feedfinder

feedfinder

nodejs package for finding RSS and Atom feeds from a given URL and vice-versa

Reporting bugs or proposing changes
Usage
Methods
Caveats

Usage

To install:

npm install @hughrun/feedfinder

In your code:

const feedfinder = require('@hughrun/feedfinder')

feedfinder.getFeed(url)
  .then( x => {
    console.log(x)
    // returns an object
  })
  .catch( e => {
    console.error(e)
    // returns a string
  })

  feedfinder.getSite(feed)
    .then( x => {
      console.log(x)
      // returns an object
    })
    .catch( e => {
      console.error(e)
      // returns a string
    })

Methods

All feedfinder methods are Promises.

getFeed

getFeed(url) takes a full url (i.e. including protocol) and returns an object with the given url, the feed url, and the site name, or alternatively returns an error in the form of a string.

Examples:

feedfinder.getFeed('http://hughrundle.net')
/*  
returns:
    {
      url: 'https://hughrundle.net',
      feed: 'https://www.hughrundle.net/rss/',
      title: 'Information Flaneur'
    }
*/

feedfinder.getFeed('http://nla.gov.au')
//  returns error: 'No link to RSS or Atom feed found at this URL'

feedfinder.getFeed("https://www.example.com")
// returns error: 'URL cannot be found'

Note that the error message is returned as an error - so if you don't catch it, nothing is returned.

getSite

getSite(url) takes a full feed URL and returns an object with the site url, the provided feed url, and the site name, or alternatively returns an error in the form of a string.

Examples:

feedfinder.getSite('https://www.hughrundle.net/rss')
/*
Returns:'
  {
    url: 'https://www.hughrundle.net/',
    feed: 'https://www.hughrundle.net/rss',
    title: 'Information Flaneur'
  }
*/

feedfinder.getSite('https://www.hughrundle.net')
// returns: 'No RSS or Atom file found at this URL'

feedfinder.getSite("https://www.example.com/rss")
// returns error: 'URL cannot be found'

Caveats

Well-formed web pages will list their RSS/Atom feed in a <link>element in the head, however sometimes there is a feed for a page but it is not referred to in a head <link> element. In this case, feedfinder looks in the body of the page for anchor links (i.e. <a> elements) that look like they might point to feeds. If there is more than one link to a likely feed, the first one listed will be used. This is likely to be what you want, but there is only so much that can be done with poorly-structured pages so ...it might not be.

YouTube user, channel and playlist pages should all work as long as YouTube does not change the way it constructs RSS feeds - they are not listed on pages, but as the form is known, we can construct them from the ID.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Sam Popowich and Tim Sherrat for licensing their blogs CC-BY, thus allowing me to use their homepages and feed files as examples for testing.