Sometimes, checking RSS feeds is boring.
Sometimes you just want to grab a picture or whatever from each item.
For that, there's ruby. Oh and feedzirra.
There is an RSS feed I read, except it's more of a picture feed and I just want to grab the pictures from it, and doing this through Google Reader is no fun.
That's where ruby and feedzirra come in. feedzirra is a ruby gem for dealing with RSS feeds. It's got a great interface and just works.
So let's check this out.
We can grab the feed like this:
feed = Feedzirra::Feed::fetch_and_parse(FEED)
Assuming FEED contains the URL for the feed.
Now we can play around. The easiest thing is just to play with each entry.
| feed.entries.each do |e| | |
| "Looking at the entry #{e.title.gsub("n",' ')}".printn | |
| link = (Nokogiri(e.summary)/"img").to_html | |
| next if link.empty? | |
| link = link[/"(.*)"/].gsub(/["]/,'') | |
| filename = link.split('/').last | |
| disk_file = File.expand_path(File.join(ROOT,filename)) | |
| unless File.exists?(disk_file) | |
| "Downloading new image #{filename}...".print | |
| Net.download_and_save(link,disk_file) | |
| "done!".printn | |
| end | |
| end |
The specifics for your feed will vary, but in this case I do a few things. I first print out a message so on the command line I can see that things are happening.
Using Nokogiri I grab the img tag and it's inner HTML (the to_html call).
Parse out the link with some regular expressions. Now I have the actual URL to the image I want to save. I get the filename easily with the split line, and check that it doesn't exist. If it does, we move on.
If the file doesn't exist, we can use another method I from my own darkext library on the Net module to download and save the file.
Pretty simple eh? I love ruby.