Python Parse RSS Feed With No Dependencies

I recently wanted to parse an RSS feed as a part of a larger script. Luckily, that boils down to just working with regular-old XML. Despite the proliferation of great libraries like BeautifulSoup, whenever possible I try to stick to the standard library. Not that using Pipenv or another Python dependency tool is necessarily a ton of work, it just feels like excess overhead. Plus, it’s just fun to explore libs I haven’t had the pleasure of interacting with.

Parsing RSS with Python standard library 🔗︎

For my use case, I wanted to parse the RSS file, then pull data from the latest article as well as randomly select a few of the older pieces. The minidom module is our friend for this task, and as always a helpful Stack Overflow led the way .