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Developing Feeds with RSS and Atom
book

Developing Feeds with RSS and Atom

by Ben Hammersley
April 2005
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
270 pages
7h 13m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Developing Feeds with RSS and Atom

Feeds by SMS

In most of the examples so far, we have written the parsed feed to the screen of a computer. This is just the start. You can use the same basic structure to output to just about anything that handles text. Example 10-2 is a script that sends the top headline of a feed to a mobile phone via the Short Message Service (SMS). It uses the WWW::SMS module, outputting to the first web-based free SMS service it can find that works.

Example 10-2. rsssms.pl sends the first headline title to a mobile phone via SMS
#!/usr/local/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use LWP::Simple;
use XML::Simple;
use WWW::SMS;
   
# Take the command line arguments, URL first, then complete number of mobile
my $url=$ARGV[0];
my $number=$ARGV[1];
   
# Retrieve the feed, or die disgracefully
my $feed_to_parse = get ($url) or die "I can't get the feed you want";
   
# Parse the XML
my $parser = XML::Simple->new( );
my $rss = $parser->XMLin("$feed_to_parse");
   
# Get the data we want
my $message = "NEWSFLASH:: $rss->{'channel'}->{'item'}->[0]->{'title'}";
   
# Send the message
my @gateway = WWW::SMS->gateways( );
my $sms = WWW::SMS->new($number, $message);
foreach my $gateway(@gateway) {if ($sms->send($gateway)) {
          print 'Message sent!';
            last;
     } else {
          print "Error: $WWW::SMS::Error\n";
     }}

You can use the script in Example 10-2 from the command line or crontab like so:

            perl rsssms.pl http://full.urlof/feed.xml 123456789

You can see how to set this up on crontab to send the latest news at the desired interval. But how ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596008813Supplemental ContentErrata Page