RSS.NET unable to parse feedburner feeds

Question

I'm using RSS.NET for .NET 2.0. Try as I might, I get 0 channels for the following:

feed = RssFeed.Read("http://feeds.feedburner.com/punchfire?format=xml");

I note that for other feeds this works e.g.

feed = RssFeed.Read("http://www.engadget.com/rss.xml");

I guess it has to be a valid xml document. Do you think I should check for ".xml" in my application code or is there any way to tweak RSS.NET into accepting feedburner feeds?

Answer 1

http://feeds.feedburner.com/punchfire?format=xml seems to be an Atom feed, not RSS. Does rss.net know how to handle that?

Answer 2

The reason you are not able to get any channel nodes is that, atom format doesn't have any channel nodes. check following

• The Atom Syndication Format

Your second link is an Rss Feed, which contains channel node like as follows

<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:itunes="http://www.itunes.com/dtds/podcast-1.0.dtd"&gt;
<channel>
<title>Engadget</title>
<link>http://www.engadget.com&lt;/link&gt;
 .
 .
 .

On the other hand an atom feed does not use channel nodes, as you might understand by following specification link above.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
   <feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"&gt;
     <title type="text">dive into mark</title>
     <subtitle type="html">
       A &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; of effort
       went into making this effortless
     </subtitle>
     <updated>2005-07-31T12:29:29Z</updated>
     <id>tag:example.org,2003:3</id>
     <link rel="alternate" type="text/html"
      hreflang="en" href="http://example.org/"/&gt;
     <link rel="self" type="application/atom+xml"
      href="http://example.org/feed.atom"/&gt;
     <rights>Copyright (c) 2003, Mark Pilgrim</rights>
     <generator uri="http://www.example.com/" version="1.0">
       Example Toolkit
     </generator>
     <entry>
      .
      .
      .

EDIT: To check feed Format

    // url of the feed 
    string utlToload = @"http://feeds.feedburner.com/punchfire?format=xml"



    // load feed
        Argotic.Syndication.GenericSyndicationFeed feed = 
Argotic.Syndication.GenericSyndicationFeed.Create(new Uri(urlToLoad));

        // check what format is it
        if (feed.Format.Equals(SyndicationContentFormat.Rss))
        {
            // yourlogic here
        }
        else if (feed.Format.Equals(SyndicationContentFormat.Atom))
        {
            // yourlogic here
        } 
        else if (feed.Format.Equals(SyndicationContentFormat.NewsML))
        {
            // yourlogic here
        } 

Hope it helps

Answer 3

With .Net 3.5+ it's very easy to parse Atom feeds. BTW Atom feeds are the new standard for RSS I hear.

public class RssFeedDO
{
    public string RssFeedUrl { get; private set; }

    /// <summary>
    /// Build feed processor
    /// </summary>
    /// <param name="feedUrl">Atom or RSS url with http in front.</param>
    public RssFeedDO(string feedUrl)
    {
        this.RssFeedUrl = feedUrl;
    }

    /// <summary>
    /// Will try to get RSS data from url passed in constructor. Can do atom or rss
    /// </summary>
    /// <returns></returns>
    public SyndicationFeed GetRSSData()
    {
        SyndicationFeed feed = null;

        XmlReaderSettings settings = new XmlReaderSettings();
        settings.IgnoreWhitespace = true;
        settings.CheckCharacters = true;
        settings.CloseInput = true;
        settings.IgnoreComments = true;
        settings.IgnoreProcessingInstructions = true;
        settings.DtdProcessing = DtdProcessing.Prohibit;

        if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(this.RssFeedUrl))
        {
            using (XmlReader reader = XmlReader.Create(this.RssFeedUrl, settings))
            {
                SyndicationFeedFormatter GenericFeedFormatter = null;
                Atom10FeedFormatter atom = new Atom10FeedFormatter();
                Rss20FeedFormatter rss = new Rss20FeedFormatter();

                if (reader.ReadState == ReadState.Initial)
                {
                    reader.MoveToContent();
                }
                // try either atom or rss reading
                if (atom.CanRead(reader))
                {
                    GenericFeedFormatter = atom;
                }
                if (rss.CanRead(reader))
                {
                    GenericFeedFormatter = rss;
                }
                if (GenericFeedFormatter == null)
                {
                    return null;
                }
                GenericFeedFormatter.ReadFrom(reader);
                feed = GenericFeedFormatter.Feed;
            }
        }
        return feed;
    }
}

Now you could point an object data source to the above class and then eval some things in your ListView or RadGrid like this:

<%# Eval("Title.Text") %>

Tested with a couple feedburner feeds and it worked fine.