The best and simplest way to parse an RSS feed in Node

There are a lot of 'rss' related NPM packages but I think I've found a combination that is great for parsing RSS feeds. Something that takes up the minimal node_modules and works great. I think the killer combination is

• got for downloading, and,
• fast-xml-parser for parsing them

The code impressively simple:

const got = require("got");
const parser = require("fast-xml-parser");

(async function main() {
  const buffer = await got("https://hacks.mozilla.org/feed/", {
    responseType: "buffer",
    resolveBodyOnly: true,
    timeout: 5000,
    retry: 5,
  });
  var feed = parser.parse(buffer.toString());
  for (const item of feed.rss.channel.item) {
    console.log({ title: item.title, url: item.link });
    break;
  }
})();


// Outputs...
// {
//   title: 'MDN localization update, February 2021',
//   url: 'https://hacks.mozilla.org/2021/02/mdn-localization-update-february-2021/'
// }

I like about fast-xml-parser is that it has no dependencies. And it's tiny:

▶ du -sh node_modules/fast-xml-parser
104K    node_modules/fast-xml-parser

The got package is quite a bit larger and has more dependencies. But I still love it. It's proven itself to be very reliable and very pleasant API. Both packages support TypeScript too.

A particular detail I like about fast-xml-parser is that it doesn't try to do the downloading part too. This way, I can use my own preferred library and I could potentially write my own caching code if I want to protect against flaky network.