[Mac/iPhone src] FeedParser - an open source Cocoa RSS parser

[Kevin Ballard]

FeedParser, a brand new NSXMLParser-based RSS parser for Cocoa, has
been released as an open source project on GitHub[1]. The goal of this
project is to provide an extensible RSS/Atom parser that works on both
the iPhone and the desktop. To that end, it is based on NSXMLParser
instead of NSXMLDocument. I recognize that PubSub is available for the
desktop, but FeedParser was designed primarily with the iPhone in
mind.

In its current incarnation, FeedParser understands all of RSS 2.0
(although it does not expose all of the possible fields). It has also
been verified to correctly parse sample RSs 0.91 and RSS 0.92 feeds.
It has minimal support for Atom (to the extent that it understands
<atom:link> elements embedded in RSS feeds), but the architecture is
such that Atom support can be added over time. It also has support for
RSS extensions such as DublinCore (though again, at the moment it only
understands the <dc:creator> element but more support can be added
easily). Any elements it does not recognize are recorded as extension
elements, similar to the mechanism that PubSub uses, although
FeedParser must use its own stripped-down replacement for NSXMLElement
as it does not exist on the iPhone.

At this point in time, FeedParser is perfectly usable for parsing RSS
feeds in iPhone applications. It has also been tested on Mac OS X
10.5, but not on earlier versions. I expect it to work on 10.4 as
well, but no earlier (it requires namespace support in NSXMLParser).

FeedParser is covered under the MIT license. Feedback and patches are
welcome. If you wish to provide patches, I encourage you to fork the
project on GitHub and then send pull requests when you have useful
changes.

Please note that FeedParser is just a temporary name. FeedParser is
also the name of a well-known Python RSS parsing library. If anybody
has any good ideas for a name that's not taken, I would love to hear
them. I would prefer to end up with something better than cocoa-
feedparser.

[1]: http://github.com/kballard/feedparser

-Kevin Ballard

--
Kevin Ballard
http://kevin.sb.org
kbal...@gmail.com