tabcast

a tool to turn, ugly messy podcast XML into lines of tab-seperated values that are easy to work with on the command line.

gem install tabcast

tabcast <feed url>

The default output format is probably fine for most purposes, but you can specify your own output format with the -f flag. This uses Liquid templating and renders the specified markup for each item in the feed. For example, to get a list of the titles and Unix timestamps of a feed's items, seperated by a pipe character:

tabcast -f "{{title}}|{{time}}\n" <feed url>

Note that the default output is equivalent to using:

-f "{{utime}}\t{{title | spaces_to_underscores}}\t{{enclosure_url}}\n"

--prefix and --suffix allow you to specify strings to be printed before and after the list of templated feed items. This is useful for, as an example, building up an HTML list of the feed:

tabcast -f "<li><a href='{{ enclosure_url }}'>{{ title }}</a></li>\n" --prefix "<ul>" --suffix "</ul>" <feed url>