Common RSS Elements [Universal Feed Parser]
Keywords: RSS, Atom, CDF, XML, feed, parser, Python

# Universal Feed Parser

Parse RSS and Atom feeds in Python. 3000 unit tests. Open source.

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## Common RSS Elements

The most commonly used elements in RSS feeds (regardless of version) are title, link, description, modified date, and entry ID. The modified date comes from the `pubDate` element, and the entry ID comes from the `guid` element.

This sample RSS feed is at http://feedparser.org/docs/examples/rss20.xml.

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
    <rss version="2.0">
    <channel>
      <title>Sample Feed</title>
      <description>For documentation &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt;</description>
      <link>http://example.org/</link>
      <pubDate>Sat, 07 Sep 2002 0:00:01 GMT</pubDate>
      <!-- other elements omitted from this example -->
      <item>
        <title>First entry title</title>
        <link>http://example.org/entry/3</link>
        <description>Watch out for &lt;span style="background-image:
    url(javascript:window.location='http://example.org/')"&gt;nasty
    tricks&lt;/span&gt;</description>
        <pubDate>Sat, 07 Sep 2002 0:00:01 GMT</pubDate>
        <guid>http://example.org/entry/3</guid>
        <!-- other elements omitted from this example -->
      </item>
    </channel>
    </rss>

The `channel` elements are available in `d.feed`.

### Example: Accessing Common Channel Elements

    >>> import feedparser
    >>> d = feedparser.parse('http://feedparser.org/docs/examples/rss20.xml')
    >>> d.feed.title
    u'Sample Feed'
    >>> d.feed.link
    u'http://example.org/'
    >>> d.feed.description
    u'For documentation <em>only</em>'
    >>> d.feed.date
    u'Sat, 07 Sep 2002 0:00:01 GMT'
    >>> d.feed.date_parsed
    (2002, 9, 7, 0, 0, 1, 5, 250, 0)

The items are available in `d.entries`, which is a list. You access items in the list in the same order in which they appear in the original feed, so the first item is available in `d.entries[0]`.

### Example: Accessing Common Item Elements

    >>> import feedparser
    >>> d = feedparser.parse('http://feedparser.org/docs/examples/rss20.xml')
    >>> d.entries[0].title
    u'First item title'
    >>> d.entries[0].link
    u'http://example.org/item/1'
    >>> d.entries[0].description
    u'Watch out for <span>nasty tricks</span>'
    >>> d.entries[0].date
    u'Thu, 05 Sep 2002 0:00:01 GMT'
    >>> d.entries[0].date_parsed
    (2002, 9, 5, 0, 0, 1, 3, 248, 0)
    >>> d.entries[0].id
    u'http://example.org/guid/1'

You can also access data from RSS feeds using Atom terminology. See Content Normalization for details.

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Common Atom Elements →