Website scraping

FreshRSS has a built-in Web scraping engine that generates a feed from websites that have no RSS/Atom feed published.

How to add

Go to “Subscription Management” where a new feed can be added. Change the “Type of feed source” to one of:

An additional list of text boxes to configure the Web scraping will show.

For HTML + XPath, XPath 1.0 is used as traversing language.

Get the XPath path

Firefox: the built-in “inspect” tool may be used to help create a valid XPath expression. Select the node in the HTML, right click with your mouse and chose “Copy” and “XPath”. The XPath is stored in your clipboard now.

Get the JSON dotted path

Suppose the JSON to which you are subscribing to (or scraping) looks like this:

{
	"data": {
		"items": [
			{
				"meta": {"title": "Some news item"},
				"content": "Content of the news",
				"links": ["https://example.net/1", "https://example.org/1"]
			},
			{
				"meta": {"title": "Some other news item"},
				"content": "Yet more content",
				"links": ["https://example.net/2", "https://example.org/2"]
			}
		]
	}
}

The dot notation and bracket notation (only numeric) are supported.

Then the items are under data.items, and within each item, the title is meta.title, and the link would be links[1].

It is a similar syntax to the JavaScript way to access JSON: object.object.array[2].property.

Support string concatenation with a syntax like: meta.title & " some text" using single-quotes or double-quotes.

Tips & tricks