Sometimes, checking RSS feeds is boring.

Sometimes you just want to grab a picture or whatever from each item.

For that, there's ruby. Oh and feedzirra.

There is an RSS feed I read, except it's more of a picture feed and I just want to grab the pictures from it, and doing this through Google Reader is no fun.

That's where ruby and feedzirra come in. feedzirra is a ruby gem for dealing with RSS feeds. It's got a great interface and just works.

So let's check this out.

We can grab the feed like this:

feed = Feedzirra::Feed::fetch_and_parse(FEED)

Assuming FEED contains the URL for the feed.

Now we can play around. The easiest thing is just to play with each entry.

The specifics for your feed will vary, but in this case I do a few things. I first print out a message so on the command line I can see that things are happening.

Using Nokogiri I grab the img tag and it's inner HTML (the to_html call).

Parse out the link with some regular expressions. Now I have the actual URL to the image I want to save. I get the filename easily with the split line, and check that it doesn't exist. If it does, we move on.

If the file doesn't exist, we can use another method I from my own darkext library on the Net module to download and save the file.

Pretty simple eh? I love ruby.