in reply to RSS Parsing not working on new machine

The relevant code is

...

        my $rss = $parser->parse_string($feed);
        if(!$rss) {
            print " -- Feed is broken -- \n";
            next FEED;
        }

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The next step would be to look what is in $feed, and to remove the rest of the script to reproduce the problem.

In your code you already save the content to a file, so maybe you can reduce your code to something like:

my $feed = read_file( 'saved.rss' );
my $rss = $parser->parse_string($feed);
if(!$rss) {
    print " -- Feed is broken -- \n";
    next FEED;
}

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... but maybe the feed you retrieve already is empty?

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Re^2: RSS Parsing not working on new machine
by wintermute115 (Acolyte) on Apr 15, 2025 at 10:19 UTC
    As I say, the identical code looking at identical feeds works fine on another machine, so I don't think it's a problem with the feeds themselves. A minimal version of: 
    #!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use XML::RSS::Parser;

my $feed = "/home/ross/Downloads/New_Podcasts/archive/GMNV.rss";
my $parser = XML::RSS::Parser->new();
my $rss = $parser->parse_file($feed);
print $rss . "\n";

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    gives me: 
    $ ./test.pl 
XML::RSS::Parser::Feed=HASH(0x5ba514d23270)

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    which is what I'd expect to see, rather than the undef I get from the actual script. Yes, that file is one saved by this script.

    Changing it to point at the archived RSS rather than the version stored in memory doesn't fix the problem, though. Something is happening somewhere else that is stopping the parser from reading this file, and I can't see what it might be.

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      If reading the file seems weird, maybe it is an issue of file/directory permissions?

      Can you check whether the user your cron job runs as can access all directories in the path, starting from / ?

      Also, does the minimal script still work when running from cron ?

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        I haven't yet gotten to the point of running it from cron; so far I'm still testing it on the command line, but it's successfully writing these files, so permissions don't seem to be a problem.

        I have the minimal test reading successfully from cURL, and doing everything that the main script is doing to the Parser object.

        #!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use Data::Dumper;
use Net::Curl::Easy qw(:constants);
use XML::RSS::Parser;

my $ua_string = "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; r
+v:30.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/30.0";
my $curl = Net::Curl::Easy->new;
my $feedsrc = "https://feeds.simplecast.com/o4MKcfjK";
my $feed;

$curl->pushopt(CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, [$ua_string]);
$curl->setopt(CURLOPT_NOPROGRESS, 0);
$curl->setopt(CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
$curl->setopt(CURLOPT_CONNECT_ONLY, 0);
$curl->setopt(CURLOPT_URL, $feedsrc);
$curl->setopt(CURLOPT_WRITEDATA, \$feed);
$curl->perform();

my $parser = XML::RSS::Parser->new();
$parser->register_ns_prefix('lc_itunes', 'http://www.itunes.com/dtds/p
+odcast-1.0.dtd');
my $rss = $parser->parse_string($feed);
print $rss . "\n";

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        Which results in: 
        $ ./test.pl 
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time
+  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left
+  Speed
100  164k  100  164k    0     0  1267k      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:
+-- 1271k
XML::RSS::Parser::Feed=HASH(0x618af3317380)

        [download]

        So that's working. I just can't see why it's breaking as part of the actual script, when it's clearly readable in isolation, and works fine on a different machine.

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