RSS Reader Skill

Read and parse RSS/Atom feeds.

When to Use

• Get latest articles from a feed
• Subscribe to news sources
• Monitor blog updates
• Aggregate multiple feeds

Feed Information

Get Feed Details

# Get feed info
curl -s "https://example.com/feed.xml" | head -20

# Check if RSS or Atom
curl -s "https://example.com/feed.xml" | head -1

Parse Feeds

Using xmlstarlet

# Install if needed
# apt install xmlstarlet

# List all items
curl -s "feed.xml" | xmlstarlet sel -t -m "//item" -v "title" -n

# Get latest 5 titles
curl -s "feed.xml" | xmlstarlet sel -t -m "//item[position() <= 5]" -v "title" -n

Using xmllint

# Parse with xmllint
curl -s "feed.xml" | xmllint --format - 2>/dev/null | head -50

Using Python

# Simple feed parser
python3 -c "
import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
import urllib.request

url = 'https://example.com/feed.xml'
data = urllib.request.urlopen(url).read()
root = ET# Find channel.fromstring(data)


for item in root.findall('.//item'):
    title = item.find('title')
    if title is not None:
        print(title.text)
"

Using yq (if available)

# Convert RSS to YAML
curl -s "feed.xml" | yq -x '.rss.channel.item[]'

Common Commands

List Feed Items

# Get all item titles
curl -s "feed.xml" | grep -o '<title>[^<]*</title>' | sed 's/<title>//;s/<\/title>//'

# With descriptions
curl -s "feed.xml" | grep -o '<title>[^<]*</title>\|<description>[^<]*</description>'

Get Latest N Items

# Latest 10 items with dates
curl -s "feed.xml" | grep -o '<item>.*</item>' | head -10 | \
  while read item; do
    echo "$item" | grep -o '<title>[^<]*</title>'
    echo "$item" | grep -o '<pubDate>[^<]*</pubDate>'
    echo "---"
  done

Extract Links

# Get all article links
curl -s "feed.xml" | grep -o '<link>[^<]*</link>' | sed 's/<link>//;s/<\/link>//'

Examples

Hacker News RSS

curl -s "https://news.ycombinator.com/rss" | \
  grep -o '<title>[^<]*</title>' | sed 's/<title>//;s/<\/title>//' | head -20

TechCrunch

curl -s "https://techcrunch.com/feed/" | \
  grep -o '<title>[^<]*</title>' | head -15

GitHub Trending

# GitHub doesn't have RSS, but you can use GitHub's API
curl -s "https://api.github.com/repos?sort=updated&per_page=10" | \
  jq '.[].full_name'

Feed URLs

Common RSS feed patterns:

• WordPress: /feed/ or /feed/rss/
• Medium: /{username}/feed
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id={id}
• Twitter: Use Nitter or RSSHub

Notes

• RSS feeds may have different element names (item vs entry)
• Atom feeds use <entry> instead of <item>
• Some feeds require user-agent headers
• Consider caching feeds to avoid excessive requests