Building a Simple RSS reader, retrieving content

Mahdi Ghiasi picture Mahdi Ghiasi · Jun 13, 2012 · Viewed 7.8k times · Source

I am trying to make a simple RSS reader using SyndicationFeed class.

There are some standard tags, like <title>, <link>, <description>... there is no problem with them.

But there are some other tags. for example, in this feed, which created by WordPress, there is <content:encoded> tag. I think there may be other tags for the content part of other websites. right?

I want to know, how to find the main content of every post, is there any standards? which tags should I look for?

(for example, a site may use <content:encoded> but some other just use <description> or someone use another standard... I don't know what to do for retrieving the main content of a post)

P.S : I'm using this code for testing my simple RSS reader:

        var reader = XmlReader.Create("http://feed.2barnamenevis.com/2barnamenevis");
        var feed = SyndicationFeed.Load(reader);

        string s = "";
        foreach (SyndicationItem i in feed.Items)
        {
            s += i.Title.Text + "<br />" + i.Summary.Text + "<br />" + i.PublishDate.ToString() + "<br />";
            foreach (SyndicationElementExtension extension in i.ElementExtensions)
            {
                XElement ele = extension.GetObject<XElement>();
                s += ele.Name + " :: " + ele.Value + "<br />";
            }
            s += "<hr />";
        }
        return s;

Answer

Joe Enos picture Joe Enos · Jun 14, 2012

From our discussion in the comments, I'd probably suggest going with a 3rd party vendor instead of building it from scratch - Argotic and RSS.NET both look promising.