Table of Contents

• podparse
  • Installation
  • Overview
  • Quickstart
  • Default

podparse

A simple package for parsing podcast feeds into consistent, manageable JavaScript objects. For use with Node and in the browser. Originally based on jbierfeldt/podcast-feed-parser, but optimized and with fewer runtime dependencies.

Installation

npm install podparse

See podparse on npm.

Differences from jbierfeldt/podcast-feed-parser

This package:

• Does not contain the isomorphic-fetch dependency.
• Replaces xml2js with smaller and less memory-intensive @rgrove/parse-xml.
• Is designed to be easier to use, albeit less configurable.
• Removes empty (null, undefined, '', NaN, {}) from the output.
• Does not use hard-coded namespace prefixes (esp. itunes, googleplay, and atom).
• Handles episode sorting for both episodic and serial podcast types.

Supported Namespaces

• iTunes (http://www.itunes.com/dtds/podcast-1.0.dtd)
• Google Podcasts (http://www.google.com/schemas/play-podcasts/1.0)
• Atom Links (http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom)
• Media RSS (http://www.rssboard.org/media-rss)
• Yahoo Media (http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/)
• Spotify (https://www.spotify.com/ns/rss)
• PodLove (https://podlove.org/simple-chapters/)
• Iono.fm (http://iono.fm/rss-namespace-1.0)
• GeoRSS (http://www.georss.org/georss)
• Omny (https://omny.fm/rss-extensions)
• Acast (https://schema.acast.com/1.0/)
  • Podaccess (https://access.acast.com/schema/1.0/)
• Podping (https://podping.info/specification/1)
• Anchor (https://anchor.fm/xmlns)
• SoundOn (http://soundon.fm/spec/podcast-1.0)
• RadioPublic (https://w3id.org/rp/v1)
• BBC (http://bbc.co.uk/2009/01/ppgRss)
• Podcast Namespace (https://github.com/Podcastindex-org/podcast-namespace/blob/main/docs/1.0.md)

Overview

By default, podparse will parse a podcast's xml feed and return an object with the following properties. meta contains all of the information pertinent to the podcast show itself, and episodes is list of episode objects which contain the information pertinent to each individual episode of the podcast.

{
    meta: {
      title: 'My podcast',
      description: 'A podcast about whatever',
      // ...
    },
    episodes: [
      {
        title: 'My Episode 1',
        description: 'Episode 1',
        pubDate: '2018-11-29T10:30:00.000Z',
        // ...
      }, {
        title: 'My Episode 2',
        description: 'Episode 2',
        pubDate: '2018-11-28T10:30:00.000Z',
        // ...
      }
    ],
    liveEpisodes: [ ] // Optional Podcast 2.0 Namespace
  }
}

Quickstart

podparse has a single function: getPodcastFromFeed:

const getPodcastFromFeed = require("podparse")
const fs = require('fs')

const podcastFeed = fs.readFileSync('path/to/podcast-feed.xml', 'utf8')
const podcast = getPodcastFromFeed(podcastFeed)

console.log(podcast.meta.title)
// "My Podcast"

podcast.episodes.forEach( (episode) => {
	console.log(episode.title)
})
// "My Episode 1"
// "My Episode 2"

Options

podparse currently supports the following options:

• includeEpisodes (default: true)
  • Whether to parse <item> and <podcast:liveItem> elements for each episode.

Options are passed as an object to the getPodcastFromFeed function, for example:

const podcastWithoutEpisodes = getPodcastFromFeed(podcastFeed, {
  includeEpisodes: false
});

Real-world example

podparse will parse a feed for values based on this standard. If a field is not found in a feed, it will not be included. Here is a sample output for Planet Money:

{
  meta: {
    title: 'Planet Money',
    description: `The economy explained. Imagine you could call up a friend and say, "Meet me at the bar and tell me what's going on with the economy." Now imagine that's actually a fun evening.`,
    language: 'en',
    author: 'NPR',
    summary: `The economy explained. Imagine you could call up a friend and say, "Meet me at the bar and tell me what's going on with the economy." Now imagine that's actually a fun evening.`,
    type: 'episodic',
    generator: 'NPR API RSS Generator 0.94',
    category: [ 'Business', 'News' ],
    owner: { name: 'NPR', email: '[email protected]' },
    image: {
      url: 'https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2018/08/02/npr_planetmoney_podcasttile_sq-7b7fab0b52fd72826936c3dbe51cff94889797a0.jpg?s=1400'
    },
    lastBuildDate: '2020-03-16T21:50:01.000Z',
    pubDate: '1970-01-01T00:00:00.000Z',
    link: 'https://www.npr.org/planetmoney',
    links: []
  },
  episodes: [
    {
      title: '#980: The Fed Fights The Virus',
      description: 'The central bank is trying to prevent a health crisis from becoming a financial crisis. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter <a href="https://www.npr.org/newsletter/money?utm_source=rss_feed_copy&utm_medium=podcast&utm_term=planet_money">here</a>.',
      subtitle: 'The Federal Reserve usually has one main job: setting interest rates. But in emergencies, another Fed job becomes more important: trying to prevent a financial crisis.',
      author: 'NPR',
      summary: 'The Federal Reserve usually has one main job: setting interest rates. But in emergencies, another Fed job becomes more important: trying to prevent a financial crisis.',
      episodeType: 'full',
      guid: '5b88529b-fed8-4562-8312-61e4b24b0451',
      image: {
        url: 'https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2020/03/16/gettyimages-1204924943-594x594_wide-60e13736df6bfcb9135f158ec2873956f134aef4.jpg?s=1400'
      },
      explicit: false,
      duration: 1097,
      enclosure: {
        url: 'https://play.podtrac.com/npr-510289/edge1.pod.npr.org/anon.npr-podcasts/podcast/npr/pmoney/2020/03/20200316_pmoney_pmpod980-e086b0be-e27c-44eb-a088-d76e3104fb20.mp3?awCollectionId=510289&amp;awEpisodeId=816684372&amp;orgId=1&amp;topicId=1017&amp;aggIds=812054919&amp;d=1097&amp;p=510289&amp;story=816684372&amp;t=podcast&amp;e=816684372&amp;size=17556408&amp;ft=pod&amp;f=510289',
        length: 17556408,
        type: 'audio/mpeg'
      },
      lastBuildDate: '1970-01-01T00:00:00.000Z',
      pubDate: '2020-03-16T21:50:01.000Z',
      link: 'https://www.npr.org/2020/03/16/816684372/episode-980-the-fed-fights-the-virus'
    },
    // ... 255 more items
  ],
}

More examples can be found in test/json, including converstions of all valid RSS feeds in test/testfiles. See test/convert.js for conversion code.

Testing

To execute mocha tests run:

npm run-script test

podparse is tested every day against hundreds of thousands of real-world podcast RSS feeds as part of PodLP, a podcast app for KaiOS smart feature phones.