API Documentation

feedgen

This module can be used to generate web feeds in both ATOM and RSS format. It has support for extensions. Included is for example an extension to produce Podcasts.

copyright:

2013 by Lars Kiesow

license:

FreeBSD and LGPL, see license.* for more details.

Create a Feed

To create a feed simply instantiate the FeedGenerator class and insert some data:

>>> from feedgen.feed import FeedGenerator
>>> fg = FeedGenerator()
>>> fg.id('http://lernfunk.de/media/654321')
>>> fg.title('Some Testfeed')
>>> fg.author( {'name':'John Doe','email':'john@example.de'} )
>>> fg.link( href='http://example.com', rel='alternate' )
>>> fg.logo('http://ex.com/logo.jpg')
>>> fg.subtitle('This is a cool feed!')
>>> fg.link( href='http://larskiesow.de/test.atom', rel='self' )
>>> fg.language('en')

Note that for the methods which set fields that can occur more than once in a feed you can use all of the following ways to provide data:

  • Provide the data for that element as keyword arguments

  • Provide the data for that element as dictionary

  • Provide a list of dictionaries with the data for several elements

Example:

>>> fg.contributor(name='John Doe', email='jdoe@example.com' )
>>> fg.contributor({'name':'John Doe', 'email':'jdoe@example.com'})
>>> fg.contributor([{'name':'John', 'email':'jdoe@example.com'}, …])

Generate the Feed

After that you can generate both RSS or ATOM by calling the respective method:

>>> atomfeed = fg.atom_str(pretty=True) # Get the ATOM feed as string
>>> rssfeed  = fg.rss_str(pretty=True) # Get the RSS feed as string
>>> fg.atom_file('atom.xml') # Write the ATOM feed to a file
>>> fg.rss_file('rss.xml') # Write the RSS feed to a file

Add Feed Entries

To add entries (items) to a feed you need to create new FeedEntry objects and append them to the list of entries in the FeedGenerator. The most convenient way to do this, is to call the method add_entry(…) like this:

>>> fe = fg.add_entry()
>>> fe.id('http://lernfunk.de/media/654321/1')
>>> fe.title('The First Episode')

The FeedGenerator’s method add_entry(…) will automatically create a new FeedEntry object, append it to the feeds internal list of entries and return it, so that additional data can be added.

Extensions

The FeedGenerator supports extension to include additional data into the XML structure of the feeds. Extensions can be loaded like this:

>>> fg.load_extension('someext', atom=True, rss=True)

This will try to load the extension “someext” from the file ext/someext.py. It is required that someext.py contains a class named “SomextExtension” which is required to have at least the two methods extend_rss(…) and extend_atom(…). Although not required, it is strongly suggested to use BaseExtension from ext/base.py as superclass.

load_extension(‘someext’, …) will also try to load a class named “SomextEntryExtension” for every entry of the feed. This class can be located either in the same file as SomextExtension or in ext/someext_entry.py which is suggested especially for large extensions.

The parameters atom and rss tell the FeedGenerator if the extensions should only be used for either ATOM or RSS feeds. The default value for both parameters is true which means that the extension would be used for both kinds of feeds.

Example: Producing a Podcast

One extension already provided is the podcast extension. A podcast is an RSS feed with some additional elements for ITunes.

To produce a podcast simply load the podcast extension:

>>> from feedgen.feed import FeedGenerator
>>> fg = FeedGenerator()
>>> fg.load_extension('podcast')
...
>>> fg.podcast.itunes_category('Technology', 'Podcasting')
...
>>> fg.rss_str(pretty=True)
>>> fg.rss_file('podcast.xml')

Of cause the extension has to be loaded for the FeedEntry objects as well but this is done automatically by the FeedGenerator for every feed entry if the extension is loaded for the whole feed. You can, however, load an extension for a specific FeedEntry by calling load_extension(…) on that entry. But this is a rather uncommon use.

Of cause you can still produce a normal ATOM or RSS feed, even if you have loaded some plugins by temporary disabling them during the feed generation. This can be done by calling the generating method with the keyword argument extensions set to False.

Testing the Generator

You can test the module by simply executing:

$ python -m feedgen

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