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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-27T10:06:19+00:00

I’m studying Apple’s LazyTableImages sample code. I’d like to understand how the app is

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I’m studying Apple’s LazyTableImages sample code. I’d like to understand how the app is pulling data from the RSS feed included in the app:
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStoreServices.woa/ws/RSS/toppaidapplications/limit=75/xml

How are the contents at the above url parsed? Viewing the page source reveals HTML with no apparent xml section. While looking through the sample parsing code I found a few symbols like im:name. However these symbols are not in the contents of the above url.

I tried to host the contents of the above url locally (w/ limit=1). However pointing the sample code to @"~/Desktop/a.xml" causes the application to throw the error unsupported url.

More info: While reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rss I came across what I expected to see at phobos link above. Something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<rss version="2.0">
<channel>
        <title>RSS Title</title>
        <description>This is an example of an RSS feed</description>
        <link>http://www.someexamplerssdomain.com/main.html</link>
        <pubDate>Mon, 06 Sep 2009 16:45:00 +0000 </pubDate>

        <item>
                <title>Example entry</title>
                <description>an interesting description</description>
                <link>http://www.wikipedia.org/</link>
                <guid>unique string per item</guid>
                <pubDate>Mon, 06 Sep 2009 16:45:00 +0000 </pubDate>
        </item>

</channel>
</rss>

Is there an equivalent “human-readable” xml document corresponding to the above phobos link somewhere?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You’re right, the feed you’re looking at technically isn’t an RSS Feed. It’s an Atom 1.0 Feed, but both are popular XML-based feed formats.

    If you view the source of the feed you will see the XML elements you’re looking for, like:

    <entry>
  <updated>2011-12-09T16:15:32-07:00</updated>
  <id>http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tetris/id479943969?mt=8&amp;uo=2</id>
  <title>TETRIS® - Electronic Arts</title>
  <summary>Long summary here</summary>
  <im:name>TETRIS®</im:name>
  ...
</entry>

    Some browser versions parse RSS/Atom feeds into user-friendly HTML pages and present them instead of the actual feed, it sounds like that’s the type of HTML page you’re viewing.

    On a OS X, you could use a command like Curl to download the feed in a Terminal:

    curl -o feed.xml http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStoreServices.woa/ws/RSS/toppaidapplications/limit=75/xml
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