Acquire / http · All operations

Read an RSS feed

A variant of Fetch from the web

Read the entries of RSS feeds into rows.

Status

In arcform

Not built yet

arcform does not do this yet. Its place on the roadmap

What other tools call it

Meridian's classification; an independent blind rating agreed on 95.7% of 324 rows (variant, version 3).

Pentaho Data Integration (1)
  • RSS Inputread 2026-09-27

    Read items from RSS feeds

RapidMiner Studio (1)
  • Read RSS Feedread 2026-09-27

    Read the entries of an RSS feed from a URL into a table

Talend (1)
  • tRSSInputread 2026-09-27

    Read the entries of RSS feeds from URLs

Background

RSS is a web feed that allows users and applications to access updates to websites in a standardised, computer-readable format.[1] An RSS document, called a feed, web feed or channel, includes full or summarised text and metadata such as the publishing date and the author's name.[1] RSS is a dialect of Extensible Markup Language (XML), and every RSS file must conform to the XML 1.0 specification.[2][3]

When to use it

Websites usually use RSS feeds to publish frequently updated information, such as blog entries, news headlines and episodes of audio and video series.[1] In RSS 2.0, a channel may contain any number of items, and every element of an item is optional, although at least one of title or description must be present.[2] Expect gaps when reading a feed into rows: keep an item with no link, date or author, and leave those columns empty rather than dropping the row. (Meridian's view)

All date-times in RSS 2.0, such as the publication date in pubDate, follow the Date and Time Specification of RFC 822, except that the year may have two or four characters.[2] Parse RSS dates as RFC 822 dates rather than guessing the format, and decide how a two-digit year is to be read. (Meridian's view)

In RSS 2.0, an item's guid is a string that uniquely identifies the item, and an aggregator may use it to decide whether an item is new.[2] In RSS 2.0, when the guid element has an isPermaLink attribute of false, the guid may not be assumed to be a uniform resource locator (URL), or web address.[2][4] When a feed is read on a schedule, key its rows on guid where the feed gives one, so the same item is not loaded twice. (Meridian's view) In RSS 2.0, ttl stands for time to live: a number of minutes saying how long a channel can be cached before it is refreshed from the source.[2] Poll a feed no more often than its ttl asks. (Meridian's view)

The method

RDF Site Summary, the first version of RSS, was created by Dan Libby, Ramanathan V. Guha and Eckart Walther at Netscape, and released in March 1999.[1] In September 2002, Dave Winer released RSS 2.0, which redubbed the initials Really Simple Syndication.[1] In July 2003, Dave Winer launched the RSS Advisory Board with Brent Simmons and Jon Udell, to maintain and publish the specification and answer questions about the format.[1]

At the top level, an RSS 2.0 document is an rss element whose mandatory version attribute must be 2.0, with a single channel element beneath it.[2] In RSS 2.0, an item may represent a story, with a description that is a synopsis and a link to the full story, or may be complete in itself.[2] RapidMiner's Read RSS Feed operator outputs a data set with attributes for the publishing date, author, title, link and content of a feed.[5]

Compared with the alternatives

Atom, an alternative syndication format begun in June 2003, was motivated in part by a desire for a clean start free of the issues surrounding RSS.[1] The Atom syndication format has been adopted as Proposed Standard RFC 4287.[1] A reader built for RSS alone may not read an Atom feed, so check which of the two formats a source serves. (Meridian's view)

Sources

  1. [1]RSS - Wikipediasecondary source
  2. [2]RSS 2.0 Specification (Current)standard
  3. [3]XML - Wikipediasecondary source
  4. [4]URL - Wikipediasecondary source
  5. [5]Read RSS Feed - Rapidminer Documentationdocumentation