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Parse your eyes!

My little RSS project has foundered on the shoals of RSS parsing woes. If you have a raw apostrophe in your RSS feed, well-behaved RSS parsers will fail. Isn’t that fun? Amphetadesk works around this by just using XML::Simple directly, which I suppose I could do, but I’m kind of lazy. Mark Pilgrim wrote a nice ultra-liberal RSS parser but it’s in Python. Learning enough Python to make use of it would be easier than writing my own code using XML::Simple, I think. Maybe not. Not tonight, anyhow, either way.

Actually, what would be ideal is if everyone redid their tools to provide me with valid RSS… no? Well, OK.

Hm. (You can tell, perhaps, that I am talking out loud here. You may wish to cross to the other side of the street.) You know, somewhere in my parsing process something is unescaping the escaped apostrophes. Oh. OK, so upgrading to the current version of the XML::RSS module does help a lot. Perhaps I’ll write some HTML generating code to go around it. There’s hope yet.

Also: I am slowly experimenting with using Brad Chote’s Textile adaptation as a text filter. It’s pretty cool so far, but I’m not sure it’s necessary. I’d need to hack MT a little so that links showed up in the proper format when using the bookmarklet. It’d be healthy for me. But not tonight.

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