NAME

XML::TreePuller::CookBook::Intro - Various ways to work with an Atom feed

ABOUT

Atom documents are simple and small - they fit into RAM and don't have many nested elements. Processing them is straight forward and a good place to start learning.

Atom Format

An Atom feed looks like this:

  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
 
  <feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
 
        <title>Example Feed</title>
        <subtitle>A subtitle.</subtitle>
        <link href="http://example.org/feed/" rel="self" />
        <link href="http://example.org/" />
        <id>urn:uuid:60a76c80-d399-11d9-b91C-0003939e0af6</id>
        <updated>2003-12-13T18:30:02Z</updated>
        <author>
                <name>John Doe</name>
                <email>johndoe@example.com</email>
        </author>
 
        <entry>
                <title>Atom-Powered Robots Run Amok</title>
                <link href="http://example.org/2003/12/13/atom03" />
                <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://example.org/2003/12/13/atom03.html"/>
                <link rel="edit" href="http://example.org/2003/12/13/atom03/edit"/>
                <id>urn:uuid:1225c695-cfb8-4ebb-aaaa-80da344efa6a</id>
                <updated>2003-12-13T18:30:02Z</updated>
                <summary>Some text.</summary>
        </entry>
 
  </feed>

PROGRAMS

Feed summaries

Lets say you have 10 Atom feeds you are interested in subscribing to but you want to see what they have to offer as a summary; Perl to the rescue! The following script generates a report of an arbitrary number of Atom feeds off the Internet fetching them directly from a URL or a file. The format of the report is like this:

  Feed: Example Feed
    * Atom-Powered Robots Run Amok
    

(that sure does sound like an interesting feed)

  #!/usr/bin/env perl
  
  use strict;
  use warnings;
  
  use XML::TreePuller;
  
  foreach (@ARGV) {
        my $root = XML::TreePuller->parse(location => $_);
        my $title = $root->xpath('/feed/title')->text;
        
        print "Feed: $title\n";

        foreach ($root->xpath('/feed/entry/title')) {   
                print "  * ", $_->text, "\n";
        }
        
        print "\n\n\n";
  }

Linking to entries

Given an Atom feed what is the easiest way to build an HTML list of hyperlinks to the entries that are specified in it? We need to get the title which is stored in a single element and the hyperlink to the entry; there are multiple link elements and we only want one - the one with "rel" attribute value of "alternate". XPath makes quick work of this.

  #!/usr/bin/env perl

  use strict;
  use warnings;
  
  use XML::TreePuller;
  
  my $root = XML::TreePuller->parse(location => shift(@ARGV));
  
  print "<ul>\n";
  
  foreach($root->xpath('/feed/entry')) {
        my $title = $_->xpath('//title')->text;
        #there are many link elements but we only want one of them
        my $to = $_->xpath("//link[\@rel='alternate']")->attribute('href');
  
        print "  <li><a href=\"$to\">$title</a></li>\n";
  }
  
  print "</ul>\n";

COPYRIGHT

The ATOM example XML document was taken from Wikipedia at the following URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Atom_(standard)&oldid=353180236 and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license

All other content is copyright Tyler Riddle; see the README for licensing terms.