Reading an RSS XML Feed as a Dataframe

rss_df.r

rssToDataframe <- function(uri) {
  doc <- getURL(uri)
  doc <- xmlParse(doc) 
  src <- xpathApply(doc, "/rss/channel/item")
  items.df <- data.frame()
  
  if(length(src) > 0) {
    for(i in 1:length(src)) {
      item <- xmlSApply(src[[i]], xmlValue)
      record.df <- data.frame(t(item), stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
      items.df <- rbind(items.df, record.df)
    }
  }

  items.df$pubDate <- strptime(items.df$pubDate, "%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S", tz="GMT")
  return(items.df)
}