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.

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>