Extracting Feed URLs From OPML Files (Google Reader)

When Google changed Reader's format and broke all of my installed Firefox plug-ins, I started writing my own RSS feed reader in C. It's surprisingly simple to do if you know what features you want... and you have your own server. The fact that I use my PC as a server means I don't need to use Google's servers.

The problem was that I wanted a quick and easy way to pull all of the feed links out of Reader. Google gives the option to export them all as an OPML file. Rather than writing a one-time program to extract the links from the file using an XML library, I just ran it through sed.

sed -ne '/xmlUrl/ s/.*xmlUrl=\"//p' google-reader-subscriptions.xml | sed -e 's/\".*//' > rssurls

Maybe this will help others if they want to change the way they read news on the Web as well.