Why I Like Scripting Languages, Reason #259

The libraries bundled with Ruby 1.8 make it a breeze to munge RSS information into a web page.

Mike Clark’s running a Project Automation site, with tie-ins to his new book. We have the book’s home page on our site, where we maintain a subpage where we’ll be hosting various add-on goodies related to automation, and we wanted to excerpt the most recent news items from Mike’s page onto ours.

I know there are lots of programs out there to extract entries from an RSS feed. I know I could have used curl and XSLT. But having spent the last week revising PickAxe 2, I felt like coding. And it turns out that the solution is pretty simple. And, even better, all the libraries it uses come bundled with Ruby 1.8—no messy downloads required…

     require 'rss/0.9'
     require 'open-uri'
     require 'rdoc/template'
     require 'net/ftp'

     TEMPLATE = %{
     <div class="blogentries">
     START:entries
       <div class="blogentry">
         <a href="%link%"><span class="blogentrytitle">%title%</span></a>
         <div class="blogentrydescription">
           %description%
         </div>
       </div>
     END:entries
     </div>
     }

     TMP_FILE = "/tmp/topfive"
     BLOG_URL = ARGV[0] || fail "Missing URL"

     open(BLOG_URL) do |http|
       result = RSS::Parser.parse(http.read, false)
       entries = result.items.map do |item|
         {
           'title'       => item.title,
           'link'        => item.link,
           'description' => item.description
         }
       end

       File.open(TMP_FILE, "w") do |f|
         t = TemplatePage.new(TEMPLATE)
         t.write_html_on(f, 'entries' => entries)
       end
     end

      Net::FTP.open('www.pragmaticprogrammer.com') do |ftp|
       ftp.login('user, 'passwd')
       ftp.chdir('starter_kit/au')
       ftp.put(TMP_FILE, 'topfive', 1024)
     end