Read RSS with LINQ to XML

 

I'm sure this has been posted somewhere before, but all a quick google turned up was how to read RSS into a data set. So here is a simple way to read RSS using LINQ

 

First an object to hold the results:

 

using System;
   
    [Serializable()]
    public class RssItem
    {
        public string Title { get; set; }

        public string Link { get; set; }

        public string Description { get; set; }

    }

This is really just a simple object no smoke and mirrors, probably could be a simple struct as well.

And the code to read the RSS and populate or object

public static List<RssItem> ImportRSS(string source)
{
    XDocument doc = XDocument.Load(source,LoadOptions.None);

    return (from i in doc.Descendants("channel").Elements("item")
            select new RssItem()
            {
               Title = i.Element("title").Value,
               Link = i.Element("link").Value,
               Description = i.Element("description").Value
             }).ToList();
  }

This just loads the RSS into an XDocument object and then we query the descendants to find the items. We place those into the RssItem and return them as a list by using the ToList extension.

And there you have it no more data set.