rss-parser
A small library for turning RSS XML feeds into JavaScript objects.
Installation
npm install --save rss-parser
Usage
You can parse RSS from a URL (parser.parseURL
) or an XML string (parser.parseString
).
Both callbacks and Promises are supported.
NodeJS
Here's an example in NodeJS using Promises with async/await:
let Parser = require('rss-parser');
let parser = new Parser();
(async () => {
let feed = await parser.parseURL('https://www.reddit.com/.rss');
console.log(feed.title);
feed.items.forEach(item => {
console.log(item.title + ':' + item.link)
});
})();
TypeScript
When using TypeScript, you can set a type to control the custom fields:
import Parser from 'rss-parser';
type CustomFeed = {foo: string};
type CustomItem = {bar: number};
const parser: Parser<CustomFeed, CustomItem> = new Parser({
customFields: {
feed: ['foo', 'baz'],
// ^ will error because `baz` is not a key of CustomFeed
item: ['bar']
}
});
(async () => {
const feed = await parser.parseURL('https://www.reddit.com/.rss');
console.log(feed.title); // feed will have a `foo` property, type as a string
feed.items.forEach(item => {
console.log(item.title + ':' + item.link) // item will have a `bar` property type as a number
});
})();
Web
We recommend using a bundler like webpack, but we also provide pre-built browser distributions in the
dist/
folder. If you use the pre-built distribution, you'll need a polyfill for Promise support.
Here's an example in the browser using callbacks:
<script src="/node_modules/rss-parser/dist/rss-parser.min.js"></script>
<script>
// Note: some RSS feeds can't be loaded in the browser due to CORS security.
// To get around this, you can use a proxy.
const CORS_PROXY = "https://cors-anywhere.herokuapp.com/"
let parser = new RSSParser();
parser.parseURL(CORS_PROXY + 'https://www.reddit.com/.rss', function(err, feed) {
if (err) throw err;
console.log(feed.title);
feed.items.forEach(function(entry) {
console.log(entry.title + ':' + entry.link);
})
})
</script>
Upgrading from v2 to v3
A few minor breaking changes were made in v3. Here's what you need to know:
- You need to construct a
new Parser()
before callingparseString
orparseURL
-
parseFile
is no longer available (for better browser support) -
options
are now passed to the Parser constructor -
parsed.feed
is now justfeed
(top-level object removed) -
feed.entries
is nowfeed.items
(to better match RSS XML)
Output
Check out the full output format in test/output/reddit.json
feedUrl: 'https://www.reddit.com/.rss'
title: 'reddit: the front page of the internet'
description: ""
link: 'https://www.reddit.com/'
items:
- title: 'The water is too deep, so he improvises'
link: 'https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/3skxqc/the_water_is_too_deep_so_he_improvises/'
pubDate: 'Thu, 12 Nov 2015 21:16:39 +0000'
creator: "John Doe"
content: '<a href="http://example.com">this is a link</a> & <b>this is bold text</b>'
contentSnippet: 'this is a link & this is bold text'
guid: 'https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/3skxqc/the_water_is_too_deep_so_he_improvises/'
categories:
- funny
isoDate: '2015-11-12T21:16:39.000Z'
Notes:
- The
contentSnippet
field strips out HTML tags and unescapes HTML entities - The
dc:
prefix will be removed from all fields - Both
dc:date
andpubDate
will be available in ISO 8601 format asisoDate
- If
author
is specified, but notdc:creator
,creator
will be set toauthor
(see article) - Atom's
updated
becomeslastBuildDate
for consistency
XML Options
Custom Fields
If your RSS feed contains fields that aren't currently returned, you can access them using the customFields
option.
let parser = new Parser({
customFields: {
feed: ['otherTitle', 'extendedDescription'],
item: ['coAuthor','subtitle'],
}
});
parser.parseURL('https://www.reddit.com/.rss', function(err, feed) {
console.log(feed.extendedDescription);
feed.items.forEach(function(entry) {
console.log(entry.coAuthor + ':' + entry.subtitle);
})
})
To rename fields, you can pass in an array with two items, in the format [fromField, toField]
:
let parser = new Parser({
customFields: {
item: [
['dc:coAuthor', 'coAuthor'],
]
}
})
To pass additional flags, provide an object as the third array item. Currently there is one such flag:
-
keepArray (false)
- set totrue
to return all values for fields that can have multiple entries. -
includeSnippet (false)
- set totrue
to add an additional field,${toField}Snippet
, with HTML stripped out
let parser = new Parser({
customFields: {
item: [
['media:content', 'media:content', {keepArray: true}],
]
}
})
Default RSS version
If your RSS Feed doesn't contain a <rss>
tag with a version
attribute,
you can pass a defaultRSS
option for the Parser to use:
let parser = new Parser({
defaultRSS: 2.0
});
xml2js passthrough
rss-parser
uses xml2js
to parse XML. You can pass these options
to new xml2js.Parser()
by specifying options.xml2js
:
let parser = new Parser({
xml2js: {
emptyTag: '--EMPTY--',
}
});
HTTP Options
Timeout
You can set the amount of time (in milliseconds) to wait before the HTTP request times out (default 60 seconds):
let parser = new Parser({
timeout: 1000,
});
Headers
You can pass headers to the HTTP request:
let parser = new Parser({
headers: {'User-Agent': 'something different'},
});
Redirects
By default, parseURL
will follow up to five redirects. You can change this
with options.maxRedirects
.
let parser = new Parser({maxRedirects: 100});
Request passthrough
rss-parser
uses http/https module
to do requests. You can pass these options
to http.get()
/https.get()
by specifying options.requestOptions
:
e.g. to allow unauthorized certificate
let parser = new Parser({
requestOptions: {
rejectUnauthorized: false
}
});
Contributing
Contributions are welcome! If you are adding a feature or fixing a bug, please be sure to add a test case
Running Tests
The tests run the RSS parser for several sample RSS feeds in test/input
and outputs the resulting JSON into test/output
. If there are any changes to the output files the tests will fail.
To check if your changes affect the output of any test cases, run
npm test
To update the output files with your changes, run
WRITE_GOLDEN=true npm test
Publishing Releases
npm run build
git commit -a -m "Build distribution"
npm version minor # or major/patch
npm publish
git push --follow-tags