common-atom-elements.rst

Common Atom Elements

Atom feeds generally contain more information than :abbr:`RSS (Rich Site Summary)` feeds (because more elements are required), but the most commonly used elements are still title, link, subtitle/description, various dates, and ID.

This sample Atom feed is at http://feedparser.org/docs/examples/atom10.xml.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"
xml:base="http://example.org/"
xml:lang="en">
<title type="text">Sample Feed</title>
<subtitle type="html">
For documentation &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt;
</subtitle>
<link rel="alternate" href="/"/>
<link rel="self"
type="application/atom+xml"
href="http://www.example.org/atom10.xml"/>
<rights type="html">
&lt;p>Copyright 2005, Mark Pilgrim&lt;/p>&lt;
</rights>
<id>tag:feedparser.org,2005-11-09:/docs/examples/atom10.xml</id>
<generator
uri="http://example.org/generator/"
version="4.0">
Sample Toolkit
</generator>
<updated>2005-11-09T11:56:34Z</updated>
<entry>
<title>First entry title</title>
<link rel="alternate"
href="/entry/3"/>
<link rel="related"
type="text/html"
href="http://search.example.com/"/>
<link rel="via"
type="text/html"
href="http://toby.example.com/examples/atom10"/>
<link rel="enclosure"
type="video/mpeg4"
href="http://www.example.com/movie.mp4"
length="42301"/>
<id>tag:feedparser.org,2005-11-09:/docs/examples/atom10.xml:3</id>
<published>2005-11-09T00:23:47Z</published>
<updated>2005-11-09T11:56:34Z</updated>
<summary type="text/plain" mode="escaped">Watch out for nasty tricks</summary>
<content type="application/xhtml+xml" mode="xml"
xml:base="http://example.org/entry/3" xml:lang="en-US">
<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Watch out for
<span style="background: url(javascript:window.location='http://example.org/')">
nasty tricks</span></div>
</content>
</entry>
</feed>

The feed elements are available in d.feed.

Accessing Common Feed Elements

>>> import feedparser
>>> d = feedparser.parse('http://feedparser.org/docs/examples/atom10.xml')
>>> d.feed.title
u'Sample feed'
>>> d.feed.link
u'http://example.org/'
>>> d.feed.subtitle
u'For documentation <em>only</em>'
>>> d.feed.updated
u'2005-11-09T11:56:34Z'
>>> d.feed.updated_parsed
(2005, 11, 9, 11, 56, 34, 2, 313, 0)
>>> d.feed.id
u'tag:feedparser.org,2005-11-09:/docs/examples/atom10.xml'

Entries are available in d.entries, which is a list. You access entries in the order in which they appear in the original feed, so the first entry is d.entries[0].

Accessing Common Entry Elements

>>> import feedparser
>>> d = feedparser.parse('http://feedparser.org/docs/examples/atom10.xml')
>>> d.entries[0].title
u'First entry title'
>>> d.entries[0].link
u'http://example.org/entry/3
>>> d.entries[0].id
u'tag:feedparser.org,2005-11-09:/docs/examples/atom10.xml:3'
>>> d.entries[0].published
u'2005-11-09T00:23:47Z'
>>> d.entries[0].published_parsed
(2005, 11, 9, 0, 23, 47, 2, 313, 0)
>>> d.entries[0].updated
u'2005-11-09T11:56:34Z'
>>> d.entries[0].updated_parsed
(2005, 11, 9, 11, 56, 34, 2, 313, 0)
>>> d.entries[0].summary
u'Watch out for nasty tricks'
>>> d.entries[0].content
[{'type': u'application/xhtml+xml',
'base': u'http://example.org/entry/3',
'language': u'en-US',
'value': u'<div>Watch out for <span>nasty tricks</span></div>'}]

Note

The parsed summary and content are not the same as they appear in the original feed. The original elements contained dangerous :abbr:`HTML (HyperText Markup Language)` markup which was sanitized. See :ref:`advanced.sanitization` for details.

Because Atom entries can have more than one content element, d.entries[0].content is a list of dictionaries. Each dictionary contains metadata about a single content element. The two most important values in the dictionary are the content type, in d.entries[0].content[0].type, and the actual content value, in d.entries[0].content[0].value.

You can get this level of detail on other Atom elements too.