rss-to-js

RSS to JS parser

A small library for turning RSS XML feeds into JavaScript objects.

Installation

npm install --save rss-to-js

Usage

You can parse RSS from an XML string (parser.parseString).

NodeJS

Here's an example in NodeJS using Promises with async/await:

const rssParser = new Parser();
const feed = await rssParser.parseString(`
  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
  <rss xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" version="2.0">
    <channel>
      <title>Instant Article Test</title>
      <link>https://example.com</link>
      <description>1, 2, 1, 2… check the mic!</description>
      <item>
        <title>My first Instant Article</title>
        <link>https://example.com/my-first-article</link>
        <description>Lorem ipsum</description>
        <content:encoded>&lt;b&gt;Lorem&lt;/b&gt; ipsum</content:encoded>
        <guid>eb4a43a9-0e30-446a-b92e-de65966d5a1a</guid>
        <dc:creator>johannes</dc:creator>
        <dc:date>2016-05-04T06:53:45Z</dc:date>
      </item>
    </channel>
  </rss>
`);
 
console.log(feed.title); // Instant Article Test
 
feed.items.forEach(item => {
  // My first Instant Article: https://example.com/my-first-article
  console.log(`${item.title}: ${item.link}`);
});

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> &amp; <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 and pubDate will be available in ISO 8601 format as isoDate
• If author is specified, but not dc:creator, creator will be set to author (see article)
• Atom's updated becomes lastBuildDate 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.

const rssParser = new Parser({
  customFields: {
    feed: ['thing'],
    item: [
      ['title', 'customName'],
    ]
  }
});
 
const feed = await rssParser.parseString(`
  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
  <rss xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" version="2.0">
    <channel>
      <thing>Instant Article Test 2</thing>
      <item>
        <title>My second Instant Article</title>
        <link>https://example.com/my-second-article</link>
      </item>
    </channel>
  </rss>
`);
 
console.log(feed.thing); // Instant Article Test 2
 
feed.items.forEach(item => {
  // My second Instant Article: https://example.com/my-second-article
  // console.log(`${item.customName}: ${item.link}`); 
  expect(`${item.customName}: ${item.link}`).to.equal(
    'My second Instant Article: https://example.com/my-second-article'
  );
});

To rename fields, you can pass in an array with two items, in the format [fromField, toField]:

const 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: true to return all values for fields that can have multiple entries. Default: return the first item only.

const 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:

const parser = new Parser({
  defaultRSS: 2.0
});

xml2js passthrough

rss-to-js uses xml2js to parse XML. You can pass these options to new xml2js.Parser() by specifying options.xml2js:

const parser = new Parser({
  xml2js: {
    emptyTag: '--EMPTY--',
  }
});

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

Author(s)

• Johannes Sanders developer @Blip