RSS & Atom Structured Feed Extractor

Point at ANY RSS or Atom feed, get a clean structured dataset. One actor turns every feed on the web — RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0 (RDF) and Atom 1.0 — into the same normalized rows. No per-site scraper, no dialect wrangling.

RSS / Atom is the universal syndication format. News organizations, blogs, podcasts, GitHub releases, status pages, government notices, journal tables-of-contents and YouTube channels (Atom) all publish it. Give this actor a feed URL and it detects the dialect and flattens every entry into one consistent schema.

What it does

Fetches the feed, auto-detects the dialect, and normalizes every entry to one row shape regardless of whether the source is RSS or Atom:

Field	Notes
title, link, guid	RSS <link> text and Atom <link rel="alternate" href=> both resolve to link.
summary	RSS <description> / Atom <summary>.
content, contentType	Full text: RSS content:encoded / Atom <content> (toggle with fullContent).
author, authorEmail, authorUri	Includes Dublin Core dc:creator.
categories[]	Merges RSS <category>, Atom <category term=> and dc:subject.
publishedAt, updatedAt	Normalized to ISO-8601 UTC — parsed from RFC-822 (RSS pubDate) and RFC-3339 (Atom). The raw strings are kept in publishedRaw / updatedRaw.
enclosures[]	Podcast / media {url, type, length}.
mediaThumbnails[], mediaContent[]	Media RSS (media:thumbnail / media:content).
itunes*	Podcast fields (duration, episode, season, author, explicit, image).
commentsUrl	RSS <comments>.

Every row is also stamped with the feed-level envelope — feedTitle, feedLink, feedDescription, feedLanguage, feedUpdated, generator — plus provenance (_feedUrl, _dialect = rss2 / rdf / atom, _rowIndex) and a lossless _raw of the full parsed entry.

The parse is the point. Real feeds omit most optional elements (a plain RSS item may carry only title + link + date; a GitHub Atom entry has <updated> but no <published>), so every field is read by node presence and is nullable — an absent element is null, never a crash or a shifted column.

Input

Field	Description
feedUrl	An RSS or Atom feed URL, e.g. https://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/rss.xml. Required unless feedUrls is given.
feedUrls	Optional: harvest several feeds in one run. Each row is tagged with its _feedUrl.
maxItems	Optional global cap on rows across all feeds (one billable event per row).
fullContent	Include the full-text body when present (default true).
userAgent	Optional override. A descriptive User-Agent is sent by default — some feeds 403 a blank / generic UA.
timeoutSecs	Optional read timeout (default 60s).
bearer / extraHeaders	Optional, for auth-gated feeds. Never required, never logged.

Examples

A single news feed:

{ "feedUrl": "https://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/rss.xml" }

Harvest several feeds at once (mixed dialects):

{
  "feedUrls": [
    "https://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/rss.xml",
    "https://hnrss.org/frontpage",
    "https://github.com/apify/apify-sdk-python/releases.atom"
  ],
  "maxItems": 200
}

A YouTube channel (Atom) or a podcast feed works the same way — just pass the feed URL.

Resilience

A feed that returns a 4xx/5xx, times out, serves a non-feed body (an HTML error / anti-bot page) or malformed XML that is not a recognizable feed is skipped with a warning and the batch continues. A run where every feed is skipped fails so nothing broken ships. A reachable feed with 0 entries yields 0 rows and a clean success (unpopular is fine; the actor never fabricates rows). Feeds are parsed with the <!DOCTYPE> stripped first, so external-entity (XXE) and billion-laughs payloads cannot expand.

Pricing

Pay-per-event: one item charge per emitted row.