Question

How to use Craigslist RSS in a search application?

Asked by: ToddBeaulieu

I'd like to write an application that moniitors CL for for various items. I've experimented with pulling down listings, as shown in the code below, based on sample code I found posted. The code may or may not be the best way of doing this, as I've never used RSS before and a few things are unclear to me:

1. Exactly what comes down in an RSS? Only the TOP N listings? New listings, since the last time? It doesn't seem to retrieve a lot. Is it the typical CL page? How would I get "more"?
2. What's it mean by "subscribe"? Does the server track my subscription and try to PUSH, or does it simply mean the client application (my code) does all the work to PULL data?
3. Is there a way to pass searches to CL to alter the returned RSS, or do I pull everything down and then search through it?

I haven't found anything hel,pful on CL's site.

Thank you.

private void ReadData()
{
    XmlDocument XMLDoc = new System.Xml.XmlDocument();
    XMLDoc.Load("http://boston.craigslist.org/tls/index.rss");
 
    XmlNameTable nTable  = XMLDoc.NameTable;
    XmlNamespaceManager nsManager  = new XmlNamespaceManager(nTable); 
 
    nsManager.AddNamespace("rdf", "http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#") ;
    nsManager.AddNamespace("item", "http://purl.org/rss/1.0/") ;
    nsManager.AddNamespace("dc", "http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/") ;
    XmlNodeList XMLItems = XMLDoc.DocumentElement.SelectNodes("//rdf:RDF/item:item", nsManager) ;
 
    /*
     * items/ 
     * 
     * 
     * 
     */
     
    foreach (XmlNode currentItem in XMLItems)
    {
        string date = DateTime.Parse(currentItem.SelectSingleNode("dc:date", nsManager).InnerText).ToString("MMM-dd hh:mm");
        string title = currentItem.SelectSingleNode("item:title", nsManager).InnerText;
        string link = currentItem.SelectSingleNode("item:link", nsManager).InnerText;
        string description = currentItem.SelectSingleNode("item:description", nsManager).InnerText;
 
        Listing listing = new Listing() { Date = date, Description = description, Title = title, Link = link };
 
        CleanListing(listing);
 
        _listings.Add(listing);
    }
 
}
 
private void CleanListing(Listing listing)
{
    listing.Description = listing.Description.Replace("\r\n<br>", "");
    listing.Description = listing.Description.Replace("<br>", "");
    listing.Description = listing.Description.Trim();
}

                                  
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Asked On
2009-10-16 at 05:23:34ID24817816
Tags

RSS Parse

Topics

RSS

,

C# Programming Language

Participating Experts
1
Points
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Comments
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Answers

 

by: Ray_PaseurPosted on 2009-10-16 at 07:56:27ID: 25590144

Answers...

1. What comes down is what the publisher of the RSS sends.  If they send 3 <item> elements, you get 3, if they send 20, you get 20.  There is no standard.  The order of the <item> tags is up to the publisher.  Logic would seem to indicate that the newest would come first, but this is not guaranteed.  How to get more data?  Call up Craig's List and ask for more data.  The amount of data is really up to them - there is not a "get more" standard in XML or in the RSS subset.

2. Subscribe means that you put an RSS reader application on your computer.  Every so often a timer in the application expires and the application goes out to the RSS XML file on the remote server.  It checks the pubDate field in the RSS and if the remote pubDate is more recent than the locally stored pubDate, the RSS reader grabs a new copy of the RSS XML file.  It is 100% pull, no push.

3. Searches of the RSS data are up to you.  RSS publishers just put the data "out there" and RSS clients consume it any way they want.

Hope that helps some, ~Ray

 

by: Ray_PaseurPosted on 2009-10-16 at 07:58:04ID: 25590165

This may be a useful resource.
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html

Best regards, ~Ray

 

by: ToddBeaulieuPosted on 2009-10-19 at 06:55:01ID: 25605145

Thanks for the help. It's hard to believe I've managed to remain RSS-ignorant for so long.

A few points I've noticed after a little research:

1. The link you provided actually describes a push protocol, so apparently, it is possible to truly "subscribe" to such a service, if the service implements it.

2. It seems that there are options for working with CL. When viewing the results of any search, the RSS link at the bottom is the ful URL that includes the search criteria, as well as the output format (RSS). Therefore, the feed inherently represents the search conditions. Additionally, I could leave off most of the criteria and then parse the listings myself, using my own search mechanism if I thought I could do a better job.

3. It's entirely up to my code to extract the last "published date" from the "feed" to determine the precense of new data. That's really what I meant by "getting new data", which is what you mentioned above with the "PubDate".

I hope to experiment some more to see if I can produce anything useful. I envision a tool that monitors CL for thing I'm interested in, eliminating the need to manually troll for things.

 

by: Ray_PaseurPosted on 2009-10-19 at 07:09:35ID: 25605259

That sounds useful: "a tool that monitors CL" and it is certainly do-able.  It would be a specialized RSS reader!  Thanks for the points and best of luck with it, ~Ray

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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