CodeGuru content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
I was looking for a quick and easy way to display RSS feeds on a Web page. I choose to use C# and ASP.NET, thus my options were pretty open. I created a simple function within a script to process the RSS items from a URL for an RSS feed. You should be able to easily use this function or pull the code from it to use as your own.
The function takes a string, rssURL, as its parameter. This string contains contains the RSS URL. The function then sets up a WebRequest item using the rssURL value:
System.Net.WebRequest myRequest =
System.Net.WebRequest.Create(rssURL);
The response of that request is then placed into a WebResponse object:
System.Net.WebResponse myResponse = myRequest.GetResponse();
Next the WebResponse object is used to set up a stream to pull out the XML values:
System.IO.Stream rssStream =
myResponse.GetResponseStream();
This is followed by creating an XmlDocument object that can be used to hold the XML pulled from the stream created from the RSS URL. This XmlDocument object
is then loaded with the XML from the stream:
System.Xml.XmlDocument rssDoc = new System.Xml.XmlDocument();
rssDoc.Load(rssStream);
Now that the XML is loaded into an XmlDocument object within the program, it is easy to pull out the values using XPath. Because this is an RSS feed and not just any XML file, it can be assumed that the RSS standards are being used. In this case, it is assumed that RSS 2.0 is being used. Specific tags can be expected as well as a certain structure for the XML. You can find information on RSS 2.0 at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss.
Specifically, the individual items should be in rss/channel/. Using an XPath express, a list of Item nodes can be created by doing the
following:
System.Xml.XmlNodeList rssItems = rssDoc.SelectNodes(“rss/channel/item”);
rssItems now contains all of the item nodes from the RSS feed. These can now be processed in order to pull out the specific information wanted. In this case, the title, link, and description of each item are going to be displayed. For each item in rssItems, each the individual tagged element can be grabbed by using the
SelectSingleNode method and passing the name of the item. The return value should be assigned to an XMLNode object. The following retrieves a title node:
System.Xml.XmlNode rssDetail;
rssDetail = rssItems.Item(i).SelectSingleNode(“title”);
Now the tags need to be stripped off the element before it will be ready to use. The tags are pulled off by using InnerText. Note that while properly formatted RSS XML should have all these tags, it is best to verify. This can be done by
verifying that the value of rssDetail is not null after the SelectSingleNode call is done:
if (rssDetail != null)
{
title = rssDetail.InnerText;
}
else
{
title = “”;
}
With that, you have all the code for pulling the items out of a feed. All that is left is to use the method to display the feed. I’ve included the code for a complete ASP.NET listing that calls two feeds:
Listing SimpleRSSFeed.aspx – complete listing for displaying RSS Feeds
<%@ Page Language=”C#” %><!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN”
“http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”><script runat=”server”>
public void ProcessRSSItem(string rssURL)
{
System.Net.WebRequest myRequest = System.Net.WebRequest.Create(rssURL);
System.Net.WebResponse myResponse = myRequest.GetResponse();System.IO.Stream rssStream = myResponse.GetResponseStream();
System.Xml.XmlDocument rssDoc = new System.Xml.XmlDocument();
rssDoc.Load(rssStream);System.Xml.XmlNodeList rssItems = rssDoc.SelectNodes(“rss/channel/item”);
string title = “”;
string link = “”;
string description = “”;for (int i = 0; i < rssItems.Count; i++)
{
System.Xml.XmlNode rssDetail;rssDetail = rssItems.Item(i).SelectSingleNode(“title”);
if (rssDetail != null)
{
title = rssDetail.InnerText;
}
else
{
title = “”;
}rssDetail = rssItems.Item(i).SelectSingleNode(“link”);
if (rssDetail != null)
{
link = rssDetail.InnerText;
}
else
{
link = “”;
}rssDetail = rssItems.Item(i).SelectSingleNode(“description”);
if (rssDetail != null)
{
description = rssDetail.InnerText;
}
else
{
description = “”;
}Response.Write(“<p><b><a href='” + link + “‘ target=’new’>” + title + “</a></b><br/>”);
Response.Write(description + “</p>”);
}
}
</script><html >
<head runat=”server”>
<title>Untitled Page</title>
</head>
<body>
<form id=”form1″ runat=”server”>
<div>
<%
string rssURL = “https://www.codeguru.com/icom_includes/feeds/codeguru/rss-all.xml”;
Response.Write(“<font size=5><b>Site: ” + rssURL + “</b></font><Br />”);
ProcessRSSItem(rssURL);
Response.Write(“<hr />”);rssURL = “http://www.developer.com/icom_includes/feeds/special/dev-5.xml”;
Response.Write(“<font size=5><b>Site: ” + rssURL + “</b></font><Br />”);
ProcessRSSItem(rssURL);
%>
</div>
</form>
</body>
</html>
The output from this listing is shown in the following figure;
# # #