tidyRSS is a package for extracting data from RSS feeds, including Atom feeds, JSON feeds and georss feeds.
It is easy to use as it only has one function, tidyfeed(), which takes
two arguments, the url of the feed and a logical flag for whether you
want a geoRSS feed returned as a simple features dataframe or not.
Running this function will return a tidy data frame of the information
contained in the feed. If the url is not an rss or atom feed, it will
return an error message.
Included in the package is a simple dataset, a list of feed urls, which
you can use to experiment with. You can access this with
data("feeds").
Installation
It can be installed directly from CRAN with:
install.packages("tidyRSS")The development version can be installed from GitHub with the devtools package.
devtools::install_github("robertmyles/tidyrss")Usage
RSS feeds can be parsed with tidyfeed(), and some examples are
included in the “feeds” dataset. Here is an example of using the
package:
library(tidyRSS)
data("feeds")
# select a feed:
rss <- sample(feeds$feeds, 1)
tidyfeed(rss)
#> # A tibble: 50 x 5
#> feed_title feed_link item_title item_date_published item_link
#> <chr> <chr> <chr> <dttm> <chr>
#> 1 Instructab… http://www… All You Nee… 2018-07-04 10:03:03 http://www.i…
#> 2 Instructab… http://www… Automatic Ra… 2018-07-04 09:35:14 http://www.i…
#> 3 Instructab… http://www… DIY survival… 2018-07-04 09:27:17 http://www.i…
#> 4 Instructab… http://www… Recycled and… 2018-07-04 08:29:32 http://www.i…
#> 5 Instructab… http://www… ESP8266 Temp… 2018-07-04 08:23:55 http://www.i…
#> 6 Instructab… http://www… How to Cool … 2018-07-04 06:58:42 http://www.i…
#> 7 Instructab… http://www… DIY Laundry … 2018-07-04 06:38:56 http://www.i…
#> 8 Instructab… http://www… DIY Li-ion C… 2018-07-04 05:54:44 http://www.i…
#> 9 Instructab… http://www… Aluminum Cas… 2018-07-04 04:55:02 http://www.i…
#> 10 Instructab… http://www… Receipt hold… 2018-07-04 04:44:50 http://www.i…
#> # ... with 40 more rowsMore information is contained in the vignette: vignette("tidyrss", package = "tidyRSS").
Issues
RSS & Atom XML feeds can be finicky things, if you find one that doesn’t
work with tidyfeed(), let me
know. Please include the
url of the feed that you are trying. Pull requests and general feedback
are welcome. Many feeds are malformed. What this means is that, for a
well-formed feed, you’ll get back a tidy data frame with information on
the feed and the individual items (like blog posts, for example),
including content. For malformed feeds, it will be less than this, as
tidyfeed() deletes NA columns, where the information wasn’t in the
feed in the first place.
Related
The package is a ‘tidy’ version of two other related packages, rss and feedeR, both of which return lists. In comparison to feedeR, tidyRSS returns more information from the RSS feed (if it exists), and development on rss seems to have stopped some time ago.
Other
For an example Shiny app that uses geoRSS, see here.