Creating An RSS 2.0 Feed Using cElementTree

3 Comments

I’ve made some progress with the cElementTree Python module. After reading the available documentation and the RSS 2.0 specification, I was able to write a very simplistic RSS 2.0 feed generator in order to demonstrate the usage of this module. There is no such example in the documentation, so this might be useful to someone.

The following code saves the generated XML code to a file, named RSS2example.xml, in the script’s directory:

import cElementTree as ET
 
def Construct_Feed( Stories ):
	RSSroot = ET.Element( 'rss', {'version':'2.0'} )
	RSSchannel = ET.SubElement( RSSroot, 'channel' )
 
	ET.SubElement( RSSchannel, 'title' ).text = 'Sample RSS2 Feed'
	ET.SubElement( RSSchannel, 'link' ).text = 'http://www.example.com/rss2.xml'
	ET.SubElement( RSSchannel, 'description' ).text = 'Sample RSS2 feed generated by the cElementTree Python module'
 
	for Story in Stories:
		RSSitem = ET.SubElement ( RSSchannel, 'item' )
 
		ET.SubElement( RSSitem, 'title' ).text = Story[0]
		ET.SubElement( RSSitem, 'description' ).text = Story[1]
 
	RSSfeed = ET.ElementTree(RSSroot)
	RSSfeed.write("RSS2example.xml")
 
if __name__=='__main__':
	Stories = [
		( 'Story 1', 'This is the description of story 1' ),
		( 'Story 2', 'This is the description of story 2' ),
		( 'Story 3', 'This is the description of story 3' ),
		( 'Story 4', 'This is the description of story 4' ),
		( 'Story 5', 'This is the description of story 5' )
		]
	Construct_Feed( Stories )

The sample feed contains 5 stories, just a title and a description. The above code is free of extra XML namespaces and comments. Also, it would be possible to include the linefeed and tab characters inside the text and tail element attributes in order to produce more easily readable output. But, I deliberately decided to strip them before posting, because they might make the script seem complex.

I will post a complete RSS 2.0 feed generator script when I have the time to write it.

Creating An RSS 2.0 Feed Using cElementTree by George Notaras is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Copyright © 2006 - Some Rights Reserved

George Notaras avatar

About George Notaras

George Notaras is the editor of the G-Loaded Journal, a technical blog about Free and Open-Source Software. George, among other things, is an enthusiast self-taught GNU/Linux system administrator. He has created this web site to share the IT knowledge and experience he has gained over the years with other people. George primarily uses CentOS and Fedora. He has also developed some open-source software projects in his spare time.

Related Articles

3 responses on “Creating An RSS 2.0 Feed Using cElementTree”

  1. Nikos Kouremenos Permalink →

    try using ATOM though

  2. George Notaras Post authorPermalink →

    Yeah, I consider Atom as a more flexible feed format too. As you can see, I have taken the time to convert the deprecated WordPress Atom 0.3 feed to comply with the Atom 1.0 specification.

    But, finally, the real problem with it is if the majority of the web services fully support it. To my surprise, Google still supports only the Atom 0.3 format. Technorati seems to support Atom 1.0. The feed validator accepts only Atom 1.0. I don’t have a clue about other web services.

    This seems like a mess, so I tend to stick with RSS2 or RDF feeds for the moment.

  3. isulong seoph Permalink →

    okay i have no idea on python programming. but i love to create better RSS feeds on my blog. is python an easy language to master? :P