Converting HTML to RSS

Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi, any experts at perl able to help here?

http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2001/11/15/creatingrss.html

Apparently shows how to create your own RSS file for the BBC News headlines - however, it doesn't seem to work.

Ideally, what I want, is to do something like that, but for the following page

Is perl the best way to go, or could php do the same thing quite easily? I'm no coding expert, so any help would be great.

Cheers
James

update (broquaint): title change (was HTML 2 RSS)

Comment on Converting HTML to RSS

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Re: Converting HTML to RSS by jasonk (Parson) on Feb 17, 2003 at 14:04 UTC
Why don't you explain what you tried and how it didn't work, then maybe someone can help you, otherwise we have to just guess what it is that went wrong.	[reply]
Re: Converting HTML to RSS by Anonymous Monk on Feb 17, 2003 at 14:49 UTC
Here is what I have in the perl script. http://www.exwebjunkie.com/testperl.txt It create's the .rss file, but it just contains the following: `<?xml version="1.0"?> <rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns="http://my.netscape.com/rdf/simple/0.9/"> <channel> <title>cpfc.org</title> <link>http://www.cpfc.org/</link> <description>cpfc.org - news links.</description> </channel> </rdf:RDF>` [download] So it seems that it is not finding the articles or converting them.. update (broquaint): added formatting	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Re: Converting HTML to RSS by Tomte (Priest) on Feb 17, 2003 at 15:15 UTC
The URL you're fetching the content from returns a big java-script if I open it in mozilla or wget. I don't think LWP::Simple interpretes js, correct me if I'm wrong, and just disregard this message if I'm saying something stupid. The rest of the script contains errors I'm sure of you can spot 'em all by yourself, if your looking long enough. (using $headline as an undefined variable for example, not looping in some way over the content, etc.). Update:Maybe you shouldn't use HTML::TokeParser but try to manufacture a regexp and parse the content by yourself something like `m!<a href="([a-zA-Z0-9/?&=]+)">([^<]+)!`, which will most likely capture you the url and the title if slightly modified. regards, tomte	[reply]
Re: Converting HTML to RSS by osama (Scribe) on Feb 17, 2003 at 14:29 UTC
I would suggest stripping the javascript extras with something like: `$text=~s/document.write$'(.+?)'$;/$1/g;` [download] this would replace: document.write('*ANYTHING'); with the text between the single quotes: ANYTHING* for the data in `jsnews.txt` , this will create a valid html snippet...	[reply] [d/l]