If you are a developer like me, and you are interested in RSS / Atom, you have at some point tried to write your own feed parser. Perhaps it was to make your own aggregator. Perhaps it was for a client. Whatever the reason, you probably found that not all RSS / Atom feeds are the same. Sure, there are official specifications, but hardly anyone follows them. And many feeds contain invalid characters or structure. How do you develop a program to parse any RSS / Atom feed when there are countless variations and countless invalid feeds?

Enter the Universal Feed Parser from Mark Pilgrim. Currently in version 3.3 and written in Python, this open source project is the answer to all of your feed parsing problems. It is very liberal in its parsing, and will handle almost any invalid or mal-formed feed. It is very fast, and it stores parsed RSS / Atom elements in a standardized structure. It has been invaluable to me when I am developing a project that needs to parse RSS / Atom feeds.