pf » RSS and XPath

April 08, 2004

RSS and XPath

I came across a handy reference article on xml.com today that gives XPath queries for RSS and Atom feeds. Just last week I was attempting to parse a RSS 1.0 feed in CFMX using the XMLSearch function. I'm running into problems however due to the name spaces in RSS 1.0, here's the code I'm using:

<cfhttp url="http://www.fullasagoog.com/xml/ColdFusionMX.xml" method="get" />
<cfset rss = XMLParse(cfhttp.filecontent)>

<!--- get an array of items --->
<cfset items = XMLSearch(rss, "/rdf:RDF/item")>
<cfdump var="#items#">

The result is that the items array is empty. I think this is a namespace issue, but I'm not really sure. Is this a bug? Anyone have an idea?

BTW if your looking to parse RSS 0.9x or 2.0 with XPath check out this older blog post.

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add to del.icio.us | Tags: rss, xpath, cfml, coldfusion, xml, xmlsearch

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Comments

On 04/08/2004 at 2:26:30 PM MDT Roger Benningfield wrote:

Why not just use:

XmlSearch(rss, "//item")

That way you don't have to worry about what version of RSS you're parsing... you'll always get an array of items.

On 04/08/2004 at 2:54:45 PM MDT Pete Freitag wrote:

Hi Roger,

I tried that as well previously, it also returned an empty array. Were you able to get that to work?

-pete

On 04/08/2004 at 7:37:46 PM MDT Sean Corfield wrote:

This works:

XMLSearch(rss,"/rdf:RDF/:item")

as does this:

XMLSearch(rss,"//:item")

Because of the namespaces, you have to explicitly specify that 'item' has an empty namespace prefix.

On 04/08/2004 at 10:48:47 PM MDT Pete Freitag wrote:

Ah! Good to know, thanks Sean!

On 04/09/2004 at 2:33:43 AM MDT Roger Benningfield wrote:

Pete: I took a sec to dig around in JournURL's aggregator code, and found what I'm actually using:

XmlSearch(myRSS, "//*[name()='item']")

On 06/01/2004 at 8:39:34 PM MDT Marc wrote:

Hey Guys, Check out this post on the CF Forums, relating to XMLSearch() when the document contains namespaces. What xpath should be used here?

http://www.macromedia.com/cfusion/webforums/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=7&threadid=836385

On 12/14/2004 at 12:31:07 PM MST Justin wrote:

This seems to be the one that works best for most feeds we try to parse:

XmlSearch(myRSS, "//*[name()='item']")

I have a question about looping through the resulting array. What should the xpath be when looking for the description, title and item of the children?

Thanks...

On 03/07/2005 at 5:46:33 AM MST Pankaj wrote:

i want to read a file on particular search cretria like username="jhon" in XML using XmlSearch()