{"id":2342,"date":"2010-03-29T08:19:56","date_gmt":"2010-03-29T16:19:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/?p=2342"},"modified":"2012-04-22T22:26:52","modified_gmt":"2012-04-23T05:26:52","slug":"my-own-offline-rss-reader-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/my-own-offline-rss-reader-part-2\/","title":{"rendered":"My Own Offline RSS Reader (Part 2)"},"content":{"rendered":"

About that “true” offline RSS reader that I pitched in my last post<\/a>, I’ll have you know that I made a minimally functioning system based on that outline.<\/p>\n

These are the primary challenges\/unknowns that I assessed from the outset:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Manipulating relative URLs of supporting files<\/li>\n
  2. Parsing HTML in Python<\/li>\n
  3. Searching and replacing within the HTML file<\/li>\n
  4. Downloaded .js files that include other .js files<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    For #1, Python’s urlparse library<\/a> works wonders. For #2 and #3, look no farther than Python’s HTMLParser module<\/a>. This blog post<\/a> helped me greatly. I have chosen not to address #4 at this time. I’m not downloading any JavaScript files right now; the CSS and supporting images are mostly adequate.<\/p>\n

    Further, it turned out not to be necessary to manually build an XML parser. Whenever I encountered a task that felt like it was going to be too much work — like manually parsing the XML feeds using Python’s low-level XML systems — a little searching revealed that all the hard work was already done. In the case of parsing the RSS files, the task was rendered trivial thanks to FeedParser<\/a>.<\/p>\n

    Brief TODO list, for my own reference:<\/p>\n