Tutorial: Scraping a Simple Blog List

This example demonstrates how to create a feed from a typical blog that has a list of articles on its homepage.

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The Goal

We want to create an RSS feed that contains the title, link, and summary of each article on the blog.

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The HTML

Here’s a simplified view of the HTML structure we’re targeting. The key is to find a container element that wraps each blog post (in this case, .post-item) and then find the selectors for the title, link, and summary within that container.

<div class="posts">
  <div class="post-item">
    <h2 class="post-title"><a href="/blog/post-1">First Post Title</a></h2>
    <p class="post-summary">Summary of the first post...</p>
  </div>
  <div class="post-item">
    <h2 class="post-title"><a href="/blog/post-2">Second Post Title</a></h2>
    <p class="post-summary">Summary of the second post...</p>
  </div>
</div>

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The Configuration

This configuration uses the selectors scraper to precisely extract the content we want.

channel:
  url: https://example.com/blog
selectors:
  items:
    selector: ".post-item"
  title:
    selector: ".post-title a"
  url:
    selector: ".post-title a"
    extractor: "href"
  description:
    selector: ".post-summary"

Configuration Breakdown

• items.selector: ".post-item": This is the most important selector. It tells html2rss that every element with the class post-item is a single item in the RSS feed.
• title.selector: ".post-title a": Within each .post-item, this finds the <a> tag inside the element with the class post-title.
• url.selector: ".post-title a": This finds the same <a> tag.
• url.extractor: "href": This extracts the URL from the href attribute of the <a> tag.
• description.selector: ".post-summary": This finds the element with the class post-summary.