Reading an RSS Atom Feed as a Dataframe

rss_atom_df.r

atomToDataframe <- function(uri) {
  doc <- getURL(uri)
  doc <- xmlParse(doc) 
  src <- getNodeSet(doc, "/d:feed/d:entry", c(d = "http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"))
  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$published <- strptime(items.df$published, "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S", tz="UTC")
  items.df$updated <- strptime(items.df$updated, "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S", tz="UTC")
  return(items.df)
}