This script is an example of how to use the SimpleRSS gem to parse an RSS feed.
The script can easily be modified to support conditional gets. It also detects the feed's character encoding and converts the feed to UTF-8.
```ruby
require 'iconv'
require 'net/http'
require 'net/https'
require 'rubygems'
require 'simple-rss'
url = URI.parse('http://hbl.fi/rss.xml')
http = Net::HTTP.new(url.host, url.port)
http.open_timeout = http.read_timeout = 10 # Set open and read timeout to 10 seconds
http.use_ssl = (url.scheme == "https")
headers = {
'User-Agent' => 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1.12) Gecko/20080201 Firefox/2.0.0.12',
'If-Modified-Since' => 'store in a database and set on each request',
'If-None-Match' => 'store in a database and set on each request'
}
response, body = http.get(url.path, headers)
encoding = body.scan(
/^<\?xml [^>]*encoding="([^\"]*)"[^>]*\?>/
).flatten.first
if encoding.empty?
if response["Content-Type"] =~ /charset=([\w\d-]+)/
puts "Feed #{url} is #{encoding} according to Content-Type header"
encoding = $1.downcase
else
puts "Unable to detect content encoding for #{href}, using default."
encoding = "ISO-8859-1"
end
else
puts "Feed #{url} is #{encoding} according to XML"
end
# Use 'UTF-8//IGNORE', if this throws an exception
ic = Iconv.new('UTF-8', encoding)
body = ic.iconv(body)
feed = SimpleRSS.parse(body)
for item in feed.items
puts item.title
end
```