write.rss {animation}R Documentation

Create RSS feed from a CSV data file

Description

An RSS feed is essentially just an XML file, thus the creation is easy just with cat to write some tags into a text file. The elments of an item in an RSS feed usually contains 'title', 'link', 'author', 'description', 'pubDate', 'guid', and 'category', etc, which are stored in the CSV data file.

Usage

write.rss(file = "feed.xml", entry = "rss.csv", xmlver = "1.0", 
    rssver = "2.0", title = "What's New?", 
    link = "http://R.yihui.name", 
    description = "Animated Statistics Using R", 
    language = "en-us", copyright = "Copyright 2007, Yihui Xie", 
    pubDate = Sys.time(), lastBuildDate = Sys.time(), 
    docs = "http://R.yihui.name", 
    generator = "Function write.rss() in R package animation", 
    managingEditor = "xieyihui[at]gmail.com", 
    webMaster = "xieyihui[at]gmail.com", 
    maxitem = 10, ...)

Arguments

file the path of the output file (RSS feed); passed to cat
entry the input CSV file, containing elements for items in the RSS feed (with tag names in the header); read.csv
xmlver version of XML
rssver version of RSS
title The name of the channel. It's how people refer to your service. If you have an HTML website that contains the same information as your RSS file, the title of your channel should be the same as the title of your website.
link The URL to the HTML website corresponding to the channel.
description Phrase or sentence describing the channel.
language The language the channel is written in.
copyright Copyright notice for content in the channel.
pubDate The publication date for the content in the channel.
lastBuildDate The last time the content of the channel changed.
docs A URL that points to the documentation for the format used in the RSS file.
generator A string indicating the program used to generate the channel.
managingEditor Email address for person responsible for editorial content.
webMaster Email address for person responsible for technical issues relating to channel.
maxitem Maximum number of items to be written into the feed.
... other elements for the channel, e.g. image, cloud, etc.

Details

The items of the RSS feed are stored in the file ‘entry’, and the many arguments above are just for the channel information.

Value

None. Only a message indicating where the RSS was created.

Note

As the argument file is passed to cat, you may specify it as an empty string "" so that the result will be printed to the standard output connection, the console unless redirected by 'sink'.

Note the order of items in the CSV file: newer items are added to the end of the file. But this order will be reversed in the RSS file!

Author(s)

Yihui Xie

References

Read http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html for the specification of RSS.

See Also

cat, read.csv

Examples

# create rss feed from a sample file in 'animation' 
# to getwd() 
write.rss(entry = system.file("js", "rss.csv", package = "animation")) 

## Not run: 

# Read entries from the internet 
write.rss(entry = "http://r.yihui.name/news/rss.csv")

## End(Not run) 

[Package animation version 1.0-1 Index]