One of the first things I ever learned to program was an RSS reader. I copied C++ code from a website and wrote a terrible feed parser that failed to load just about anything I threw at it. Today we can take an easier approach using powershell.

# let's request the xml data for the feed of this site (icon in the top right has a link to this feed)
invoke-webrequest -uri https://www.thans.biz/feed.xml

This is pretty cool as we can get a response from this site but within the response we have a content object that actually contains the data returned from the web request.

# Let's make the request and output the raw xml of the feed
(invoke-webrequest -uri https://www.thans.biz/feed.xml).Content

Okay, so we can use an accessor to select the content from the request but it’s difficult to read or parse like this. On to the next step:

# Make the request and cast the data to a variable that is an xml object
[xml]$data = (invoke-webrequest -uri https://www.thans.biz/feed.xml).Content

Notice the variable “$data” is preceded by “[xml]” this assigns the variable as an xml object. The variable is assigned the content property from the result of what happens within the parenthesis. From this we can explore the “$data” variable and loop over the posts that are returned:

ForEach ($msg in $data.feed.entry){
    [PSCustomObject]@{
        'LastUpdated' = [datetime]$msg.updated
        'Description' = $msg.summary."#text"
        'Category' = $msg.category.term
        'Author' = $msg.author.name
        'Link' = $msg.link.href
    }
}

This will output the posts with some additional data and serves as a good reminder I should modify my post URL’s and summary text for rss feed readers.