Python RSS Parser that also handles FeedBurner

Question

I was in the middle of writing a Python parser script for RSS feeds. I'm using feedparser, however, I'm stuck on parsing feeds from FeedBurner. Who needs FeedBurner nowadays? Anyways..

For example, I couldn't find ways to parse

http://feeds.wired.com/wired/index

http://feeds2.feedburner.com/ziffdavis/pcmag

When I put those into the feedparser library, don't seem to work. Tried putting ?fmt=xml or ?format=xml at the end of the urls, but still didn't get in xml format.

Do I need to use html parser such as BeautifulSoup to parse FeedBurner feeds? Preferably, is there a python public parser or aggregator script that handles this already?

Any tip or help will be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

It's possible you have version issue or you're using the API incorrectly -- it would help to see your error message. For example, the following works with Python 2.7 and feedparser 5.0.1:

>>> import feedparser
>>> url = 'http://feeds2.feedburner.com/ziffdavis/pcmag'
>>> d = feedparser.parse(url)
>>> d.feed.title
u'PCMag.com: New Product Reviews'
>>> d.feed.link
u'http://www.pcmag.com'
>>> d.feed.subtitle
u"First Look At New Products From PCMag.com including Lab Tests, Ratings, Editor's and User's Reviews."
>>> len(d['entries'])
30
>>> d['entries'][0]['title']
u'Canon Color imageClass MF9280cdn'

And with the other URL:

>>> url = 'http://feeds.wired.com/wired/index'
>>> d = feedparser.parse(url)
>>> d.feed.title
u'Wired Top Stories'
>>> d.feed.link
u'http://www.wired.com/rss/index.xml'
>>> d.feed.subtitle
u'Top Stories<img src="http://www.wired.com/rss_views/index.gif" />'
>>> len(d['entries'])
30
>>> d['entries'][0]['title']
u'Heart of Dorkness: LARPing Goes Haywire in <em>Wild Hunt</em>'