Subscribing to feeds

RSS is probably the biggest secret of the internet. Its time in the spotlight seemed to be during the 2000s, and it enables easy subscription to websites. It is present in lots of websites and it's incredibly useful.

At its core, RSS is a way of presenting a succession of ordered references (typically articles, but also other elements such as podcast episodes or YouTube publications) and publishing times. This makes for a very natural way of learning what articles are new since the last check, as well as presenting some structured data about them, such as the title and a summary.

In this recipe, we will present the feedparser module and determine how to obtain data from an RSS feed.

RSS is not the only available feed format. There's also a format called Atom, but Atom and RSS are more or less the same. feedparser is also capable of parsing Atom, so both formats can be processed in the same way.

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