module PoliticoRSS

A module for parsing POLITICO RSS feeds (www.politico.com/rss).

Constants

VERSION: Please observe semantic versioning (semver.org/).

Public Class Methods

feed(feed_name) click to toggle source

Request information about, and contents of, a given RSS feed.

@param [String] feed_name The name of the POLITICO RSS feed. Get this from the feed’s URL.

@example PoliticoRSS.feed(“politics08”)

@return [Hash]

# File lib/politico_rss.rb, line 19
def self.feed(feed_name)
  feed_url = "http://www.politico.com/rss/#{feed_name}.xml"

  doc = Nokogiri::XML(open(feed_url))
  response = Hash.from_xml(doc.to_s)
  response = response["rss"]["channel"]
  response = response.to_snake_keys # rename "pubDate" attribute to "pub_date", and rename any other camel-cased keys that might exist in the future
  response[:link] = response[:link][0][:href] unless response[:link].kind_of?(String) # simplify "link" attribute from a Hash to a String (if necessary - sometimes its just a string)
  response[:items] = response.delete(:item) # rename "item" attribute to "items"
  response[:items] = [response[:items]] unless response[:items].kind_of?(Array) # ensure the "items" attribute is an array, even if there is only one item, in which case it was a hash

  return response
end