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Show HN: Feedsmith — Fast parser & generator for RSS, Atom, OPML feed namespaces
Hi HN! While working on a project that involves frequently parsing a lot of feeds, I needed a fast JavaScript-based parser to extract specific fields from feed namespaces. Existing Node packages were either too slow or merged all feed formats, losing namespace information. So I decided to write it myself and created this NPM package with a simple API.
Feedsmith supports all feed formats and many popular namespaces, including: Podcast, Media, iTunes, Dublin Core, and more. It can also parse and generate OPML files.
I am currently adding support for more namespaces and feed generation for RSS, Atom and RDF. The library grew into something bigger than I initially anticipated, so I also started creating a dedicated documentation website to describe all the features.
- piotrkulpinski 1y agoLooks great! Do you have any benchmarks comparing the performance with similar packages?
- macieklamberski 1y agoThanks! For now I have some benchmarks for parsing, as this has been my main focus regarding performance. It consistently ranks in the top 2 with the caveat that other libs do not support most of the feed namespaces that Feedsmith does. Here are the results: https://github.com/macieklamberski/feedsmith/blob/main/benchmarks/README.md https://github.com/macieklamberski/feedsmith/blob/main/bench....
- jauntywundrkind 1y agoWell done, congrats! Those are great looking results!
- renegat0x0 1y agoNice project! Good job! Now somebody might also find interesting what I have done. - I decided that implementing RSS reader for 100x time is really stupid, so naturally I wrote my own [0] - my RSS reader is in form of API [1], which I use for crawling - can be installed via docker. User has to only parse JSON via API. No need to use requests, browsers, status codes - my weapon of choice is python. There is python feedparser package, but I had problems in using in parallel, because some XML shenanigans, errors - my reader, serves crawling purpose, so I am interested in most basic elements, like thumbnails, so all nuance from RSS is lost - detects feeds from sites automatically Links [0] https://github.com/rumca-js/crawler-buddy/blob/main/src/webtools/feedreader.py https://github.com/rumca-js/crawler-buddy/blob/main/src/webt... [1] https://github.com/rumca-js/crawler-buddy https://github.com/rumca-js/crawler-buddy
- DIYgod 1y agoGreat job! I'm the creator of RSSHub (https://github.com/DIYgod/RSSHub https://github.com/DIYgod/RSSHub) and Folo (https://github.com/RSSNext/Folo https://github.com/RSSNext/Folo), I previously used rss-parser and encountered some issues, feedsmith has features that interest me, I'll give it a try!
- macieklamberski 1y agoI was in the same situation — using rss-parser, but eventually faced with some issues. It also turned out, its performance is not that good. In benchmarks, it's 4-5x slower. In my case, switching to Feedsmith almost doubled the overall parsing speed. This is including the fetching of feeds, which is the main bottleneck. PS. Great projects, I know and follow both. :)
- vivzkestrel 1y agofeedparser in python vs this library, how do they compare?
- macieklamberski 1y agoHard to say, as I'm not very familiar with Python. However, from what I understand, JavaScript is generally faster (don't quote me on that). This is quite an interesting idea — benchmarking feed parsing libraries in different languages. I'll give it some thought.
- urbanisierung 1y agoWell done!