RSS feeds are a valuable source of information, providing a structured way to access content from various websites. Go offers robust libraries to parse and manipulate XML data, making it a great choice for working with RSS feeds. In this blog post, we'll explore how to use Go to parse an RSS feed and extract the image of the latest post. We'll use the MonkeyUser website's RSS feed as our example.

Prerequisites

Before diving into the code, make sure you the gofeed and the goquery libraries installed on your system. You can install them using the following commands:

1go get github.com/mmcdole/gofeed
2go get github.com/PuerkitoBio/goquery

Parsing the RSS Feed

First, we need to fetch and parse the RSS feed from MonkeyUser. We'll use the gofeed package for this purpose.

 1package main
 2
 3import (
 4    "fmt"
 5    "strinbs"
 6
 7    "github.com/PuerkitoBio/goquery"
 8    "github.com/mmcdole/gofeed"
 9)
10
11func main() {
12    // Create an RSS feed parser
13    parser := gofeed.NewParser()
14
15    // Fetch and parse the RSS feed
16    feed, err := fp.ParseURL("https://monkeyuser.com/rss/")
17    if err != nil {
18        fmt.Println("Error parsing RSS feed:", err)
19        return
20    }
21
22    // Ensure the feed has entries
23    if len(feed.Items) == 0 {
24        fmt.Println("No items found in the RSS feed.")
25        return
26    }
27
28    // Extract the latest post's image
29    latestPost := feed.Items[0]
30
31    // Extract the text from the latest post (which can be Content or Description)
32    latestPostDescription := latestPost.Content
33    if latestPostDescription == "" {
34        latestPostDescription = latestPost.Description
35    }
36
37    latestPostImage := extractImageURL(latestPostDescription)
38
39    if latestPostImage != "" {
40        fmt.Println("Image URL of the latest post:", latestPostImage)
41    } else {
42        fmt.Println("Image not found for the latest post.")
43    }
44
45}
46
47func extractImageURL(description string) string {
48    doc, err := goquery.NewDocumentFromReader(strings.NewReader(description))
49    if err != nil {
50        return "", err
51    }
52
53    imageUrl, _exists_ := doc.Find("img").Attr("src")
54    return imageUrl
55}

Conclusion

In this blog post, we've demonstrated how to use Go and the goquery and gofeed libraries to fetch and parse an RSS feed from MonkeyUser and extract the image of the latest post. This knowledge can be applied to various other RSS feeds to gather specific information or content from websites.