Bash: Display Top Hacker News Links in Firefox: cURL, IFS, delimiter, while loop, case statement, HTML template

top-hacker-news.sh

#!/bin/bash
# Push links of top Hacker News posts to HTML file, then view in Firefox
# Based on: https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/parsing-rss-news-feed-bash-script
# `$ bash top-hn.sh > top.html`

# get top Hacker News RSS XML blob
sudo curl https://news.ycombinator.com/rss -o top-hn.xml

# `xmlgetnext()` sets internal field separator as `>` and delimiter as `<`
# to separate XML tags into `TAG` and `VALUE` fields
xmlgetnext () {
  local IFS='>' # internal field separator
  read -d '<' TAG VALUE # delimiter
}

# XML code is piped to the while-looped `xmlgetnext()`
# a case statement (pattern-matching expression)
# matches fields for the HTML template
# http://tldp.org/LDP/Bash-Beginners-Guide/html/sect_07_03.html
cat top-hn.xml | while xmlgetnext ; do
  case $TAG in
    'item')
      title=''
      link=''
      pubDate=''
      ;;
    'title')
      title="$VALUE"
      ;;
    'link')
      link="$VALUE"
      ;;
    'pubDate')
      pubDate="$VALUE"
      ;;
    '/item')
    cat<<EOF
    <span>&#8226;</span><a href="$link"> $title</a><span style="color: #CCCCCC;"> ${pubDate/%?????/}</span><br>
EOF
      ;;
  esac
done

firefox top.html

In a Unix-like terminal emulator:

$ bash top-hn.sh > top.html