Why aren't there any dates in the Netflix.com NewWatchInstantlyRSS feed entries (when parsed with feedparser)?

Question

The output from the following:

import feedparser
d = feedparser.parse('http://www.netflix.com/NewWatchInstantlyRSS')
d.entries[177].keys()

is:

['summary_detail', 'links', 'title', 'summary', 'guidislink', 'title_detail', 'link', 'id']

According to http://feedparser.org/docs/common-rss-elements.html, there should be a "date" element in the entries.

A clue perhaps is that when I open http://www.netflix.com/NewWatchInstantlyRSS on Firefox or Safari (on Mac OS X), I don't see any dates. (Actually Safari puts the date & time that I opened the feed beside each element.) But somehow Google Reader gets the unique dates for each element. (That's the reason I chose entry 177 above--that's the index to 'Dare', which is the first entry for today according to Google Reader, which shows "8:32 AM" beside it.)

Is there something I'm not understanding about RSS? Am I missing some kind of cross-reference feed with the dates? I've combed through all the entries in the feed and in several entries and don't see anything that might point to a different URL or any kind of dates.

Answer 1

IF you look at the raw source of the RSS feed at http://www.netflix.com/NewWatchInstantlyRSS (Open in a web browser and view the source) you'll see they did not include a date element. There SHOULD be, but there is not.

EDIT: Sorry I didn't read your question completely. I don't know where Google is getting its value for the date. I put the feed in google as well and I'm getting 10:32 AM Today for Dare which is not equal to yours no matter what timezone. I would say their own cache as to when they retrieved the updated feed and perhaps they have different servers which would explain our differences.

There's no special properties of RSS feeds to get this value when it simply isn't there. IF you need it. I suggest using a method similar to what I believe Google is using.