sfeed(1)

NAME

sfeed – RSS and Atom parser

SYNOPSIS

sfeed [baseurl]

DESCRIPTION

sfeed reads RSS or Atom feed data (XML) from stdin. It writes the feed data in a TAB-separated format to stdout. If the baseurl argument is a valid absolute URL then the relative links or enclosures will be made an absolute URL.

TAB-SEPARATED FORMAT FIELDS

The items are output per line in a TAB-separated format.

For the fields title, id and author each whitespace character is replaced by a SPACE character. Control characters are removed.

The content field can contain newlines and these are escaped. TABs, newlines and '\' are escaped with '\', so it becomes: '\t', '\n' and '\\'. Other whitespace characters except spaces are removed. Control characters are removed.

The order and content of the fields are:

1. timestamp: UNIX timestamp in UTC+0, empty if missing or on a parse failure.
2. title: Title text, HTML code in titles is ignored and is treated as plain-text.
3. link: Link
4. content: Content, can have plain-text or HTML code depending on the content-type field.
5. content-type: "html" or "plain" if it has content.
6. id: RSS item GUID or Atom id.
7. author: Item, first author.
8. enclosure: Item, first enclosure.
9. category: Item, categories, multiple values are separated by the '|' character.

EXIT STATUS

The sfeed utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs.

EXAMPLES

curl -s 'https://codemadness.org/atom.xml' | sfeed

To convert the character set from a feed that is not UTF-8 encoded the iconv(1) tool can be used:

curl -s 'https://codemadness.org/some_iso-8859-1_feed.xml' | \
iconv -f iso-8859-1 -t utf-8 | \
sfeed

EXAMPLE SETUP

1. Create a directory for the sfeedrc configuration and the feeds:

mkdir -p ~/.sfeed/feeds

2. Copy the example sfeedrc(5) configuration:

cp sfeedrc.example ~/.sfeed/sfeedrc
$EDITOR ~/.sfeed/sfeedrc

Or import existing OPML subscriptions using sfeed_opml_import(1):

sfeed_opml_import < file.opml > ~/.sfeed/sfeedrc

3. To update feeds and merge the new items with existing items:

sfeed_update

4. Format feeds to a plain-text list:

sfeed_plain ~/.sfeed/feeds/*

Or format feeds to a curses interface:

sfeed_curses ~/.sfeed/feeds/*

There are also other formatting programs included. The README file has more examples.

AUTHORS

Hiltjo Posthuma ⟨[email protected]⟩

CAVEATS

If a timezone for the timestamp field is not in the RFC 822 or RFC 3339 format it is not supported and the timezone is interpreted as UTC+0.