Question

I’m following instructions on http://www.rubyrss.com/ to parse a feed from craigslist.org:

http://seattle.craigslist.org/sof/index.rss

Everything seems to run fine, but when I can’t get any dates from the parsed object:

irb(main):010:0> rss.date NoMethodError: undefined method `date' for #<RSS::RDF:0x2c412b8>         from (irb):10 irb(main):011:0> rss.channel.date NoMethodError: undefined method `date' for #<RSS::RDF::Channel:0x2c406ec>         from (irb):11         from :0 irb(main):012:0> rss.items[0].date NoMethodError: undefined method `date' for #<RSS::RDF::Item:0x2cdc290>         from (irb):12         from :0 irb(main):013:0> rss.items[1].date NoMethodError: undefined method `date' for #<RSS::RDF::Item:0x2cd04a4>         from (irb):13         from :0 

What am I doing wrong here?

Answer 1

Take a look at the rss feed using Firefox so you can easily see the structure of the feed. The date items are represented using ‘Dublin Core’ <dc:date>

Try this:

require 'rss/dublincore' rss.items[3].dc_date  #=>  Sat Apr 18 01:02:11 -0400 2009 

More details at the Ruby rss parser reference and Dublin Core.