SimpleFeedReader

SimpleFeedReader

Easy to use, simple, Syndication feed reader (Atom / RSS). Available as Nuget Package.

Usage

var reader = new FeedReader();
var items = await reader.RetrieveFeedAsync("http://www.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/International.xml");

foreach (var i in items)
    Console.WriteLine($"{i.Date.ToString("g")}\t{i.Title}");

Output:

4/16/2014  4:27 AM     Growth Rose 7.4% in First Quarter, China Reports
4/16/2014 12:29 AM     Milan Court Gives Berlusconi a Year of Community Service
4/15/2014 12:34 PM     Desalination Plant Said to Be Planned for Thirsty Beijing
4/15/2014  7:24 PM     After Prank by Dutch Girl on Twitter, Real Trouble
4/15/2014  4:33 PM     Afghanistan Says NATO Airstrike in East Killed Civilians
4/16/2014 12:49 AM     Iran Escalates Dispute Over U.N. Envoy
...

Notes

By default the FeedReader suppresses exceptions (since feeds tend to go down occasionally, they contain invalid XML from time-to-time and have all other sorts of problems). However, you can tell the FeedReader to throw exceptions simply by setting the throwOnError argument of the FeedReader's constructor to true.

The FeedReader also accepts an optional FeedNormalizer (needs to implement the IFeedItemNormalizer interface). This "normalizer" can transform or otherwise affect the way SyndicationItems are transformed into FeedItems. The FeedItem is the basic object retrieved from feeds and, for simplicity, contains only a few simple properties and methods. It has Title, Summary, Content, Uri , PublishDate, LastUpdatedDate, Images and Categories properties and that's about it. The default DefaultFeedItemNormalizer strips and decodes any HTML in the Title, Summary, Content to (try to) reliably return plain text only. The Date property will be populated with whatever the SyndicationItem's latest date is: the PublishDate or LastUpdatedTime.

You can implement your own IFeedItemNormalizer (see the UnitTest project for examples) to handle 'normalization' differently to your desire. The FeedReader has some convienience methods like RetrieveFeedsAsync() that retrieve more than one feed.

The project is aimed at easy, don't-make-me-think, retrieval of syndication feeds' entries. It is by no means intended as full-fledged feedreader. It is, however, easily extensible for your purposes (again, see the UnitTest project for examples; the ExtendedFeedItem and ExtendedFeedItemNormalizer are nice concrete examples of this idea).