Parse website for RSS Feed URL

[brian515]

Hi all,

I am trying to incorporate an RSS reader into my app, and I want to be able to parse a given URL for the URL of the RSS feeds associated with the URL. For example, I want the user to supply "http://www.engadget.com" and I want to return "feed://www.engadget.com/rss.xml"

Is this possible to use with the NSXML parser class. I have the parser set up to log what tags it returns, and I can't seem to figure out which (if any) of the tags it returns designates an RSS feed.

Thanks in advance!

[ZunePod]

This will only work for ones that you know, unless if you create something that trys different variations until it finds the right feed thing.

[brian515]

Originally Posted by ZunePod

This will only work for ones that you know, unless if you create something that trys different variations until it finds the right feed thing.

So you're saying there's no way? Then how do browsers know there is an RSS feed present? There has to be a way.

[JasonR]

According to this page: Atom (standard) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, RSS feeds are either linked to the word "Subscribe" or with the RSS icon. So you'll have to parse the HTML pages to find these elements. See if you can find those in your tag logs.

[smasher]

There's also an HTML tag that tells the browser if there's a feed for the current site. Do "view source" on this very web page, and you'll find this code:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="iPhone Dev SDK Forum RSS Feed" href="http://www.iphonedevsdk.com/forum/external.php?type=RSS2" />
	
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="iPhone Dev SDK Forum - iPhone SDK Development - RSS Feed" href="http://www.iphonedevsdk.com/forum/external.php?type=RSS2&amp;forumids=19" />

[brian515]

Originally Posted by smasher

There's also an HTML tag that tells the browser if there's a feed for the current site. Do "view source" on this very web page, and you'll find this code:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="iPhone Dev SDK Forum RSS Feed" href="http://www.iphonedevsdk.com/forum/external.php?type=RSS2" />
	
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="iPhone Dev SDK Forum - iPhone SDK Development - RSS Feed" href="http://www.iphonedevsdk.com/forum/external.php?type=RSS2&amp;forumids=19" />

Thank you. I didn't realize that that was present on every webpage. So, to parse this out, I do not need the NSXMLParser? Sorry if this is a dumb question.

[tjnew]

Originally Posted by brian515

Thank you. I didn't realize that that was present on every webpage. So, to parse this out, I do not need the NSXMLParser? Sorry if this is a dumb question.

i was trying to parse html getting rss link elements but no luck.
Using

- (void)parserNSXMLParser *)parser didStartElementNSString *)elementName
I was able to see that there were link elements but i could not store that links into array.

did you find anything about this?

did anyone else work something like this?