RSS / Atom Feed Reader

Use this skill when a script needs to read a feed and you want one normalized shape across both RSS 2.0 and Atom, with no third-party dependency. It does a single ElementTree pass and pulls title, link, id, published, and summary from either format, so downstream code (dedup, digest, alert) never has to branch on feed type.

When to invoke

• User says: "read this RSS feed", "poll a blog feed", "get the latest entries from an Atom feed", "watch a site for new posts".
• Code already fetched feed bytes and needs structured entries.

When NOT to invoke

• The source has a real JSON API - call that instead of scraping a feed.
• You need full feedparser quirks handling (every malformed dialect) - install feedparser.

Concrete example

User input:

Read https://example.com/feed.xml and print each post title and link.

Output:

# Copy assets/feed.py into your project, then:
from urllib.request import urlopen
from feed import parse_feed

with urlopen("https://example.com/feed.xml", timeout=20) as r:
    for item in parse_feed(r.read()):
        print(item["title"], "->", item["link"])

Every item is a dict with the same keys whether the feed is RSS or Atom, so dedup by id and sort by published work without special-casing.

Pattern to apply

1. Parse once with xml.etree.ElementTree; iterate item (RSS) and {atom}entry (Atom).
2. Normalize to a stable key set so the rest of the pipeline is feed-format agnostic.
3. Fall back from guid/atom id to the link so every item has a stable identity for dedup.
4. Keep network out of the parser: pass in bytes/text so it stays pure and testable.

Reference: assets/feed.py.

Source

Distilled from the author's news-aggregation projects. v1.0.0. See also: [[gmail-imap-digest]], [[sqlite-state]], [[pipeline-orchestrator]].

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