Scraping RSS scraping system

Question

I am relatively new to python only about 2 months of learning mostly by myself and loving it. I have been trying to design a program that will scrape text RSS feeds from the National Weather Service but I have no idea where to start. I want something that will scan for severe weather aka tornado watches warnings exct and send them to my email. I have already scripted a simple email alert system that will even text my phone. I was wondering if any of you guys could point me in the right direction in how to go about building an rss scraper and incorporating that with the email program to build a functional weather alert system? I am a huge weather nerd if you cant tell, and this will end up being my senior year project and something to hopefully impress my meteorology professors next year. I would appreciate any help anybody could give. Thanks, Andrew :D

Answer 1

Don't reinvent the wheel, just use FeedParser. It knows how to handle all corner cases and crazy markup better than you'll ever do.

Answer 2

You will need a RSS Feed parser. Once you have parsed the feeds, you will have all the relevant information needed by you. Take a look at feedparser: http://code.google.com/p/feedparser/

Answer 3

you can use scrapy. scrapy is the one of the latest, greatest crawling tool. You can use this to scrape any web content. Its worth learning.

http://doc.scrapy.org/en/0.14/index.html