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:

go get github.com/mmcdole/gofeed
go 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.

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "strinbs"

    "github.com/PuerkitoBio/goquery"
    "github.com/mmcdole/gofeed"
)

func main() {
    // Create an RSS feed parser
    parser := gofeed.NewParser()

    // Fetch and parse the RSS feed
    feed, err := fp.ParseURL("https://monkeyuser.com/rss/")
    if err != nil {
        fmt.Println("Error parsing RSS feed:", err)
        return
    }

    // Ensure the feed has entries
    if len(feed.Items) == 0 {
        fmt.Println("No items found in the RSS feed.")
        return
    }

    // Extract the latest post's image
    latestPost := feed.Items[0]

    // Extract the text from the latest post (which can be Content or Description)
    latestPostDescription := latestPost.Content
    if latestPostDescription == "" {
        latestPostDescription = latestPost.Description
    }

    latestPostImage := extractImageURL(latestPostDescription)

    if latestPostImage != "" {
        fmt.Println("Image URL of the latest post:", latestPostImage)
    } else {
        fmt.Println("Image not found for the latest post.")
    }

}

func extractImageURL(description string) string {
    doc, err := goquery.NewDocumentFromReader(strings.NewReader(description))
    if err != nil {
        return "", err
    }

    imageUrl, _exists_ := doc.Find("img").Attr("src")
    return imageUrl
}

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.