IETF RFC Editor Index Scraper

Extract structured metadata for every published IETF Request for Comments (RFC) — the foundational standards documents of the Internet, from RFC 1 (1969) through today's TLS, HTTP/3, OAuth, and DNS specifications. This Actor parses the official RFC Editor XML index and turns ~9,700 RFCs into clean, filterable JSON.

The IETF RFC corpus is the canonical source-of-truth for how the Internet works. Engineers, standards consultants, protocol researchers, compliance auditors, patent prosecutors, and AI agents reasoning about networking all need it as structured data — not a 20MB XML file. This Actor solves that.

Key Features

• Every RFC — From RFC 1 to the latest publication, including obsoleted documents
• Status & stream filters — Filter by Proposed Standard, Internet Standard, Best Current Practice, Informational, Experimental, Historic; or by stream (IETF / IAB / IRTF / Independent / Legacy)
• Year range — Pull RFCs by publication year window
• Keyword filter — Substring match across title, keywords, and abstract
• Current-only mode — Skip RFCs that have been obsoleted by a newer document
• Standards relationships — Captures obsoletes, obsoleted-by, updates, updated-by, and also-known-as (BCP/STD/FYI) cross-references
• No authentication — Public IETF data source

Output Data Fields

Field	Description
rfcNumber	Integer RFC number
docId	Document ID (e.g., RFC9293)
title	RFC title
authors	List of author names
month / year	Publication month and year
formats	Available file formats (ASCII, HTML, PDF, XML)
pageCount	Page count
currentStatus	Current status (Proposed Standard, Internet Standard, etc.)
publicationStatus	Original publication status
stream	Publishing stream (IETF, IAB, IRTF, Independent, Legacy)
doi	Digital Object Identifier
keywords	Author-supplied keywords
abstract	Plain-text abstract
obsoletes	Doc-IDs of RFCs this one obsoletes
obsoletedBy	Doc-IDs of RFCs that obsolete this one
updates	Doc-IDs this one updates
updatedBy	Doc-IDs that update this one
alsoKnownAs	BCP / STD / FYI document IDs
hasErrata	Whether errata exist
rfcUrl	Canonical rfc-editor.org URL

How to Scrape the RFC Index

1. Open the RFC Editor Index Scraper on Apify Store
2. (Optional) Filter by status, stream, year range, or keyword
3. (Optional) Enable "Current RFCs Only" to skip obsoleted documents
4. Click Start — every matching RFC is written to the default dataset

Pricing

This Actor uses pay-per-result pricing. A full ~9,700-RFC extract finishes in well under a minute since it parses a single XML file.

Use Cases

• Standards tracking — Subscribe to a filter (e.g., new TLS RFCs) for compliance updates
• Patent prior-art search — Filter by year/keyword to find pre-existing protocol disclosures
• AI protocol assistants — Build RAG pipelines that answer questions about IETF standards
• Vendor compliance audits — Confirm products implement current (not obsoleted) RFCs
• Academic / education — Bulk metadata for citation tooling and curriculum design

Legal & Disclaimer

The IETF RFC series is published by the RFC Editor and is freely available under the IETF Trust Legal Provisions. This Actor reads the public rfc-index.xml from rfc-editor.org and parses it locally. No authentication is bypassed. Data is provided "as is" without warranty.