OPML in FreshRSS

FreshRSS supports the OPML format to export and import lists of RSS/Atom feeds in a standard way, compatible with several other RSS aggregators.

However, FreshRSS also supports several additional features not covered by the basic OPML specification. Luckily, the OPML specification allows extensions:

An OPML file may contain elements and attributes not described on this page, only if those elements are defined in a namespace.

and:

OPML can also be extended by the addition of new values for the type attribute.

FreshRSS OPML extension

FreshRSS uses the XML namespace https://freshrss.org/opml to export/import extended information not covered by the basic OPML specification.

The list of the custom FreshRSS attributes can be seen in the source code, and here is an overview:

HTML+XPath or XML+XPath

• <outline type="HTML+XPath" ...: Additional type of source, which is not RSS/Atom, but HTML Web Scraping using XPath 1.0.

ℹ️ XPath 1.0 is a standard query language, which FreshRSS supports to enable Web scraping.

• <outline type="XML+XPath" ...: Same than HTML+XPath but using an XML parser.

The following attributes are using similar naming conventions than RSS-Bridge.

• frss:xPathItem: XPath expression for extracting the feed items from the source page.
  • Example: //div[@class="news-item"]
• frss:xPathItemTitle: XPath expression for extracting the item’s title from the item context.
  • Example: descendant::h2
• frss:xPathItemContent: XPath expression for extracting an item’s content from the item context.
  • Example: .
• frss:xPathItemUri: XPath expression for extracting an item link from the item context.
  • Example: descendant::a/@href
• frss:xPathItemAuthor: XPath expression for extracting an item author from the item context.
  • Example: "Anonymous"
• frss:xPathItemTimestamp: XPath expression for extracting an item timestamp from the item context. The result will be parsed by strtotime().
• frss:xPathItemTimeFormat: Date/Time format to parse the timestamp, according to DateTime::createFromFormat().
• frss:xPathItemThumbnail: XPath expression for extracting an item’s thumbnail (image) URL from the item context.
  • Example: descendant::img/@src
• frss:xPathItemCategories: XPath expression for extracting a list of categories (tags) from the item context.
• frss:xPathItemUid: XPath expression for extracting an item’s unique ID from the item context. If left empty, a hash is computed automatically.

JSON+DotNotation

• <outline type="JSON+DotNotation" ...: Similar to HTML+XPath but for JSON and using a dot/bracket syntax such as object.object.array[2].property.

• frss:jsonItem: JSON dot notation for extracting the feed items from the source page.
  • Example: data.items
• frss:jsonItemTitle: JSON dot notation for extracting the item’s title from the item context.
  • Example: meta.title
• frss:jsonItemContent: JSON dot notation for extracting an item’s content from the item context.
  • Example: content
• frss:jsonItemUri: JSON dot notation for extracting an item link from the item context.
  • Example: meta.links[0]
• frss:jsonItemAuthor: JSON dot notation for extracting an item author from the item context.
• frss:jsonItemTimestamp: JSON dot notation for extracting an item timestamp from the item context. The result will be parsed by strtotime().
• frss:jsonItemTimeFormat: Date/Time format to parse the timestamp, according to DateTime::createFromFormat().
• frss:jsonItemThumbnail: JSON dot notation for extracting an item’s thumbnail (image) URL from the item context.
• frss:jsonItemCategories: JSON dot notation for extracting a list of categories (tags) from the item context.
• frss:jsonItemUid: JSON dot notation for extracting an item’s unique ID from the item context. If left empty, a hash is computed automatically.

JSON Feed

• <outline type="JSONFeed" ...: Uses JSON+DotNotation behind the scenes to parse a JSON Feed.

HTML+XPath+JSON

• <outline type="HTML+XPath+JSON+DotNotation" frss:xPathToJson="..." ...: Same as JSON+DotNotation but first extracting the JSON string from an HTML document thanks to an XPath expression.
  • Example: //script[@type='application/json']

cURL

A number of cURL options are supported:

• frss:CURLOPT_COOKIE
• frss:CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE
• frss:CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION
• frss:CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER
• frss:CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS
• frss:CURLOPT_POST
• frss:CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS
• frss:CURLOPT_PROXY
• frss:CURLOPT_PROXYTYPE
• frss:CURLOPT_USERAGENT

Miscellaneous

• frss:cssFullContent: CSS Selector to enable the download and extraction of the matching HTML section of each articles’ Web address.
  • Example: div.main, .summary
• frss:cssFullContentFilter: CSS Selector to remove the matching HTML elements from the full content retrieved by frss:cssFullContent.
  • Example: .footer, .aside
• frss:filtersActionRead: List (separated by a new line) of search queries to automatically mark a new article as read.

Dynamic OPML (reading lists)

• frss:opmlUrl: If non-empty, indicates that this outline (category) should be dynamically populated from a remote OPML at the specified URL.

Example

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<opml version="2.0">
	<head>
		<title>FreshRSS OPML extension example</title>
	</head>
	<body>
		<outline xmlns:frss="https://freshrss.org/opml"
			text="Example"
			type="HTML+XPath"
			xmlUrl="https://www.example.net/page.html"
			htmlUrl="https://www.example.net/page.html"
			description="Example of Web scraping"
			frss:xPathItem="//a[contains(@href, '/interesting/')]/ancestor::article"
			frss:xPathItemTitle="descendant::h2"
			frss:xPathItemContent="."
			frss:xPathItemUri="descendant::a[string-length(@href)&gt;0]/@href"
			frss:xPathItemThumbnail="descendant::img/@src"
			frss:cssFullContent="article"
			frss:filtersActionRead="intitle:⚡️ OR intitle:🔥&#10;something"
		/>
	</body>
</opml>