I’ve battled for days on this, but I now finally know how to parse feeds and store them in a database in Ruby On Rails. This won’t be of much interest to the casual reader, but if you are scouring the web for an answer (as I was) then you will probably find this very useful:


class Feed < ActiveRecord::Base
require_association 'post'
require 'feed-normalizer'
require 'open-uri'
require 'rss/2.0'

belongs_to :user
has_many :posts, :dependent => :destroy

#put some other stuff here for feed validation etc

def refresh_all
refresh(Feed.find(:all))
end

def refresh(feeds)
feeds.each do |feed|
rss = FeedNormalizer::FeedNormalizer.parse open(feed.uri)
rss.entries.each do |item|
post = Post.new(:feed_id => feed.id)
post.link = item.url or raise "post has no link tag"
post.title = item.title or "no title"
post.content = item.content or "no text"
post.created_at = item.date_published if item.date_published
post.save
end
end
end

end