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Universal Feed Parser is awesome, except for embedded videos.

If you have never dealt with pythons awesome feedparser, Universal Feed Parser, you should check it out. This bad boy can take some of the crapiest, most mal-formed feeds atom, or rss, and give you back manicured, well formed python objects. I have used the project many times over, and am indebted.

There current security model is so tight that it removes all object, and embed tags. This is very secure, and for most people probably a good idea. But, while working on a recent project, I ran smack into this, because I am processing feeds with videos in them, and the videos are the most important part of the feeds. So, I needed to allow object, and embed tags

I thought mayby I would have to maintain my own version of feedparser, but that just had many problems written all over it. Then I remembered that python, being the awesome language that it is, allows you to monkey patch classes. It works because everything is an object, including classes.

This is my quick tip feedparser tip if you need to extend feedparser to include object, and embed tags

import feedparser
feedparser._HTMLSanitizer.acceptable_elements = feedparser._HTMLSanitizer.acceptable_elements + [“object”, “embed”]

Thats it now when you kick off a feed parser object it will whitelist object, and embed tags