rss_safe_parse.md

The RSS Parser in Ruby's standard library is too strict, and is therefore, I believe, unfit for production. Feedzirra is tolerant of invalid XML, and I recommend it over the RSS module in Ruby.

However, if you know the RSS you're dealing with valid XML 100% of the time, and that you won't get 404 errors or anything else unexpected, then you might like to use it. Here's a little monkey patch to make it slightly safer:

module RSS
  class Parser
    def self.safe_parse(url, &block)
      begin
        open(url) do |xml|
          feed = RSS::Parser.parse(xml)
          yield feed
        end
      rescue Exception => e
        $stdout.puts "Error: #{e}"
      end
    end
  end
end

Use it like so:

RSS::Parser.safe_parse("http://mysite.com/podcast.xml") do |feed|
  feed.items.each do |item|
    puts item.title
  end
end

The only problem with Feedzirra is that it doesn't use Ruby's standard Net::HTTP. It instead uses a Ruby wrapper for the curl unix utility, which faster but also means I can't use FakeWeb, my favorite (also, the only) HTTP stubbing library for it. No problem, just a minor inconvenience!