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Quickstart

Parse a feed

from rss_parser import parse
from requests import get  # noqa

rss_url = "https://rss.art19.com/apology-line"
response = get(rss_url)

feed = parse(response.content)

# Print out feed meta data
print("Language", feed.channel.language)
print("RSS", feed.version)

# Iteratively print feed items
for item in feed.channel.items:
    print(item.title)
    print(str(item.description)[:50])

Language en
RSS 2.0
Wondery Presents - Flipping The Bird: Elon vs Twitter
<p>When Elon Musk posted a video of himself arrivi
Introducing: The Apology Line
<p>If you could call a number and say you’re sorry

parse() detects the feed type from the XML root element and returns the matching typed model — RSS, Atom or RDF. If you already know what you're parsing, use the explicit parser classes instead:

from rss_parser import RSSParser, AtomParser, RDFParser, PodcastParser

rss = RSSParser.parse(rss_xml)
atom = AtomParser.parse(atom_xml)

Description still contains HTML?

In the output above the description contains <p> tags — that's because the feed wraps it in CDATA:

<![CDATA[<p>If you could call ...</p>]]>

rss-parser gives you the feed's data as-is; sanitizing embedded HTML is up to you.

Tags: content and attributes

Every XML tag is wrapped in a Tag object that separates the text from the XML attributes:

item = feed.channel.items[0]

item.title.content        # "Wondery Presents - ..." - the typed value
item.title.attributes     # {} - dict of XML attributes, @-prefix stripped, snake_cased

str(item.title)           # same as str(item.title.content)
item.title.upper()        # attribute access is forwarded to the content

Self-closing tags like <enclosure url="..." length="..." type="..."/> have content=None and their data in .attributes:

enclosure = item.enclosures[0]
enclosure.attributes["url"]   # "https://..."

Serialize back to JSON

feed.model_dump()        # full structure, Tag objects as {"content": ..., "attributes": ...}
feed.json_plain()        # flattened: every Tag becomes just its content value

Next steps