About the RSS Feed Viewer
Feed XML looks simple until you actually have to check one. RSS 2.0 puts items under channel, Atom calls them entries and hides the link in an href attribute, and RSS 1.0 scatters items as siblings of the channel element. This viewer recognises all three shapes, tells you which one it found, and renders the same tidy list either way, so you can confirm a feed your code just generated without wiring up a reader.
Item summaries in the wild are usually escaped HTML. Rather than showing you a wall of entity references, the description or content field is stripped of tags, its entities are resolved and the whitespace is collapsed to a single readable paragraph capped at four hundred characters. Dates are printed exactly as the feed publishes them, because a feed with a malformed date is a bug worth seeing rather than hiding behind a helpful reformat. Author fields are read from either the RSS author element, a Dublin Core creator, or the name inside an Atom author block.
The item count in the header is the number in the document, while the list shows however many you allow with the Items to show box, which keeps a thousand item archive from freezing the page. Copy hands back a plain text digest of the feed. For structured output instead, XML to JSON keeps every element, and OPML Viewer reads the subscription file that lists your feeds.
How to use
- Fetch the feed XML however you like and paste it into the left pane.
- Read the header line to confirm the feed type and how many items the document contains.
- Raise or lower Items to show when a large archive feed takes too long to scan.
- Untick Show summaries for a compact list of titles, links and dates only.
Common questions
- Can it fetch a feed from a URL?
- No. The page has no network access, so paste or upload the XML yourself. Most feeds open directly in a browser tab where you can copy the source.
- Which feed formats are supported?
- RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0 built on RDF, and Atom. The header tells you which one was detected.
- Why is the HTML in my descriptions gone?
- Summaries are reduced to plain text so the list stays readable. The original markup is untouched in your input pane.
- Are items sorted by date?
- No. They appear in document order, or reversed if you choose that. Publishers order feeds deliberately and resorting would hide mistakes.