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Question

Getting the RSS link from the <head> in Actionscript 2

Answer 1

+1 A:

HTML parsing is hard! Even if you find a solution that works for one site, it will likely break in another. if you can find a library to help you your life will be a lot easier.

If you can not find a html parser for actionscript 2, maybe you could set up a server script to it for you? Like:

myXML.load("http://yourserver.com/cgi-bin/findrss?url=foo.com");

and then have it return the url as xml

If you try this approach, I recommend the python library Beautiful Soup. I've used it before and, in my opinion, it's amazing. It will work on any website you give it, no matter how horrible the markup is.

It would look something like this:

#!/usr/bin/python
import cgi
import cgitb; cgitb.enable() # Optional; for debugging only
import urllib2
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup

def getRssFromUrl(url):
    try:
        Response = urllib2.urlopen(url)
    except Exception:
        print "<error>error getting url</error>"
        return []
    html = Response.read()
    soup = BeautifulSoup(html)
    rssFeeds = soup.findAll('link', attrs={"type" : "application/rss+xml"})
    return rssFeeds

print "Content-type: text/xml\n\n"
form = cgi.FieldStorage()
if form.has_key("url") is True:
    url = form["url"].value
else:
    url = ""
print "<xml>"
rssFeeds = getRssFromUrl(url)
for feed in rssFeeds:
    print ("<url>%s</url>" % feed["href"])
print "</xml>"

asperous.us 2009-07-14 03:44:30

Unfortunately I cannot set up a server script to do it for me, but thank you for the good response :D

Anton 2009-07-14 13:13:39

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Getting the RSS link from the <head> in Actionscript 2

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