Question

I need help to pull RSS feeds from a facebook page I’m using the following code but it keeps giving me an error :

string url = 
    "https://www.facebook.com/feeds/page.php?id=40796308305&format=rss20";

XmlReaderSettings settings = 
    new XmlReaderSettings
                    {
                         XmlResolver = null,
                         DtdProcessing=DtdProcessing.Parse,

                     }; 
XmlReader reader = XmlReader.Create(url,settings);

SyndicationFeed feed = SyndicationFeed.Load(reader);

foreach (var item in feed.Items)
{
    Console.WriteLine(item.Id);
    Console.WriteLine(item.Title.Text);
    Console.WriteLine(item.Summary.Text);

}

if (reader != null) reader.Close();

This code works perfectly with any blog or page rss but with Facebook rss it give an exception with the following message

The element with name ‘html’ and namespace ‘http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml’ is not an allowed feed format.

Thanks

Answer 1

Facebook will return HTML in this instance because it doesn’t like the User Agent supplied by XmlReader. Since you can’t customize it, you will need a different solution to grab the feed. This should solve your problem:

var req = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(url);
req.Method = "GET";
req.UserAgent = "Fiddler";

var rep = req.GetResponse();
var reader = XmlReader.Create(rep.GetResponseStream());

SyndicationFeed feed = SyndicationFeed.Load(reader);

This is strictly a behavior of Facebook, but the proposed change should work equally well for other sites that are okay with your current implementation.