Feedstail

Feedstail is a tail-f-like utility for feeds. It monitor a feed and emits new entries. Feedstail aim to be simple, hackable and compatible with rsstail its C brother.

License

Feedstail is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License v3 or later.

Get started

Use pip to install feedstail the easy way:

$ pip install feedstail

Or retrieve the project with git and install it:

$ git clone https://github.com/Psycojoker/feedstail.git
$ cd feedstail
$ python setup.py install

Then, launch feedstail with a random feeds to test it:

$ feedstail -u http://hackeragenda.be/events/events.rss

Examples

By default, feedstail will checkout the feeds every 15 minutes. If you want to customize this interval you can use the i option. The following example will retrieve feeds every 5 seconds:

$ feedstail -u http://hackeragenda.be/events/events.rss -i 5

The default output format may not be ok for you. You can specify your own format using the f option. The given fields must be an available property of the feed entries. The following example will output the published date, the title and the link:

$ feedstail -u http://hackeragenda.be/events/events.rss -f "{published}: {title} - {link}"

This last example use the string formatting syntax appeared in the 2.6 version of Python. However, feedstail aim to be 2.5 compatible so you can use the old string formatting syntax:

$ feedstail -u http://hackeragenda.be/events/events.rss -f "%(published)s: %(title)s - %(link)s"

Feedstail compares the id element to find new entries. You can choose another element of comparison with the k option. The following example says to feedstail to use the title to find new entries:

$ feedstail -u http://hackeragenda.be/events/events.rss -i 2 -k title

As feedstail is built above feedparser, the available values of format fields and keys can be found in the documentation of the library.

Importing to other python project

Feedstail could be imported to another python project with:

from feedstail import feedGenerator
from feedstail.config import Config

Options :

• key : The comparaison key. By default: id
• reverse : Boolean value for reversing the entries of the feed. By default: False
• number : At the first time, show x entries. By default, it is None and shows all the received entries.
• ignore_key_error : Boolean value for ignore keys errors. By default: False
• no_endl : Boolean value for ignoring end lines. By default: False
• url : The url. By default: None
• format : The format of entries.

Options not present :

• interval : The interval time for checking the feed.
• one shot : Get once the feed.

The feedGenerator take an instance of Config as parameters and return a generator. This generator will return an array of entries (could be an empty array) with the defined format.

Example:

from feedstail import feedGenerator
from feedstail.config import Config

feed = feedGenerator(Config(url="http://hackeragenda.be/events/events.rss", format=u'{title} - {link}'))
print '\n'.join(feed.next())

Contribute !

• Fork the project: https://github.com/Psycojoker/feedstail.git
• Create your patch in a topic branch
• Send pull requests or send your patches via e-mail

Don't forget to mark your commits by one of the following flag:

• [enh]: Your commit add a notable enhancement, a new feature for instance
• [fix]: Your commit is a bugfix
• [doc]: Your commit improve the documentation
• [mod]: Your commit bring general changes, matching neither of the above, like refactoring