[Newsboat] Export an RSS (.xml) from the Newsboat

[Cristian González López]

Greetings,

I have got interest to use Newsboat for a UAB student project. But I'm searching with no exit if with Newsboat I can export a feed in an RSS format (.xml). I mean: I import to Newsboat an RSS format, and then I export It with Newsboat. This is because I will use the Newsboat potential for been automatically recording the feed entrances (that their doesn't will be always in the provider) and then use It for make statistics with the RSS format on R (sentimental analysis). Has got this any solution? If not, I suggest that It is a cool thing to implement. If then I use Newsboat, how will you like that I cite Newsboat?

Sincerely,

Cristian González López

[Alexander Batischev]

Hello Cristian,

Newsboat doesn't provide a way to export to RSS, and I don't think it
should. It's an end-user application, not meant to be used as
middleware. It only exports to formats that are useful to end users,
like OPML and plain text.

That said, you can still leverage Newsboat for your project. All the
downloaded items are stored in an SQLite3 database, located in
~/.newsboat/cache.db by default. You can use SQLite command-line tool to
export all article bodies in CSV:

$ sqlite3 ~/.newsboat/cache.db
sqlite> .mode csv
sqlite> .output articles.csv
sqlite> select content from rss_item;

I believe R can read CSV files, so that should cover your needs. Perhaps
R even has bindings for SQLite, to import SQL tables straright into
R tables; I'm not sure.

We don't make any promises about the database structure, so there is no
user documentation for it. But I believe you can make sense of it if you
run ".schema" in sqlite prompt and consult SQLite's docs on CREATE TABLE
statement. If something is still unclear, don't hesitate to ask here.

I'm not sure how software is cited; I guess you'll need author(s),
title, and a URL? If so, please attribute it to "Alexander Batischev and
Newsboat contributors". The title would be "Newsboat", and the URL would
be "https://newsboat.org".

--
Regards,
Alexander Batischev

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