RSS Feed to Array

[sjorrel]

For a project I'm working on I needed a way to read data from an RSS feed into an array, so I came up with these functions .

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func rssToArray ($feedUrl) 
;This function returns a two dimensional array.
;It requires the URL of an RSS feed as a parameter.
;The first dimension of the array represents each item in the feed.
;The second dimension is as follows:
;   0 = The title of the news item
;   1 = The news item description
;   2 = Link to the item 
;
;   [0][0] returns the number of news items. 
    
    dim $rssString = ""
    dim $rssFilepath = @tempdir & "\tempfeed.dat"
    
    inetget ( $feedUrl, $rssFilepath );downloads the rss feed to the temp dir
    
    $rssFile = fileopen ($rssFilepath,0)    
    While 1;reads the contents of the downloaded rss feed into a string
        $newChar = FileRead($rssFile, 1)
        If @error = -1 Then ExitLoop
        $rssString = $rssString & $newChar
    Wend
    fileclose ( $rssFile ) 
    
    $tempArray = StringSplit ( $rssString, "<item>" , 1 );splits the rss string into news items
    
    $numberOfElements = ( ubound ( $tempArray ) ) 
    
    dim $rssArray [$numberOfElements-1][3];creates the array to hold news items
    
    $rssArray[0][0] = $numberOfElements-2;sets [0][0] to the number of news items available in the feed 
    
    filedelete ( @tempdir & "\tempfeed.data" );cleans up data file
    
    for $x=2 to $numberOfElements-1 ;populates the array with data
        $rssArray[$x-1][0] = extractString ($tempArray[$x],"<title>","</title>")
        $rssArray[$x-1][1] = extractString ($tempArray[$x],"<description>","</description>")
        $rssArray[$x-1][2] = extractString ($tempArray[$x],"<link>","</link>")
    next 
    
    return $rssArray
EndFunc

func extractString ( $string, $startString, $endString ) 
;this function returns the contents of a string between two substrings
    $startStringPos = stringinstr ( $string, $startString ) 
    $endStringPos = stringinstr ( $string, $endString ) 
    
    $startPos = $startStringPos + stringlen ( $startString ) - 1
    $endPos = $endStringPos - 1
    
    $extractedString = stringleft ( $string, $endPos )
    $extractedString = stringtrimleft ( $extractedString, $startPos ) 
    
    return $extractedString
EndFunc

It could do with being expanded upon, maybe by returning details about the feed such as its title, ttl etc. But I didn't need that at the moment.

I did a search before creating this, and didn't see any other function like it. Maybe somebody will have some use from it.

[Alterego]

You could have done it in one command using my _ScreenScrape UDF =)