Rewrite the Podcast parser in C++

[Nekhelesh Ramananthan]

Current we have a javascript xmlhttprequest that we use to fetch podcast episodes. However this implementation has limitations like not being able to provide to subscribe to password protected podcasts and soome podcasts returning no episodes. This is something we must fix for v1.0. Also the parser must be made more flexible and resilient to breakages due to bad feed.

[Frederik Elwert (frederik-elwert)]

This is one of the podcasts that shows no episodes:

http://www.religiousstudiesproject.com/feed/podcast/

[Morgan (z-admin-angels-gmail-com)]

Hello,

I cannot read feed from podcloud.fr , I use a lot this plateform for listening podcast, unfortunatlly, it's not 100% valid :

http://feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fmintcast.org%2Fcategory%2Fmp3%2Ffeed%2F

[Eran Uzan (etherpulse)]

Can this help? https://developer.ubuntu.com/api/apps/qml/sdk-15.04.6/QtQuick.XmlListModel.XmlListModel/

[Nekhelesh Ramananthan (nik90)]

@Eran Uzan, hmm I think that should do the job. This should vastly simplify the parsing code at http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~podbird-devs/podbird/devel/view/head:/app/podcasts.js#L168. We could even go one step further and add some reliability by looking for other potential fields in case the fields are not completely valid.

However, one thing that this doesn't support is feeds that require authentication. But then again we could handle that using a different logic.

Want to explore XmlListModel and try replacing our current parser with it ;) ?

[Frederik Elwert (frederik-elwert)]

For what it’s worth, the podcast mentioned above <http://www.religiousstudiesproject.com/feed/podcast/> does work now in 0.8.

[Eran Uzan (etherpulse)]

@nik90 I`ll give it a shot :)

[Nekhelesh Ramananthan (nik90)]

@etherpulse, actually we already started rewriting the parser in C++. We will upload a branch to launchpad where it is somewhat useable. You can perhaps help improve it further and help with testing.