intertwingly

Jeff Hodges: I was recruited after Bob Aman of FeedTools fame saw me hyping my translation of Mark Pilgrim’s FeedParser from Python to Ruby, and thought it was pretty good.  The translation, of course, is called rFeedParser and it really is pretty good.  I’ll have a post on that soon.  First, I want to fix the silly options bugs that I was turned on to a little while ago.

I’m not sure how I missed this before, but a

sudo apt-get install libxml-parser-ruby1.8
gem install rfeedparser

And I’m up and running.  Things worth exploring:

• Seeing if there is some synergy with the html5lib ruby port, or at least see if they can standardize on some common dependencies.  But beyond that if there are things of common utility in rFeedParser, putting such code in html5lib may allow more people to befit from such.
• Making the FeedParser tests less Python specific.  Jeff cites one specific already: dates stored as 9-tuples.  It would be trivial to change the tests to use a function like feeddate(...) which in Python is implemented as an identity function, but enables other languages to put in their own transformation.
• Mars