Yahoo.Pipes - a couple of tips, hacks, tips

    Unlike some, I do not pretend to be the most important pipe scholar. However, since I often work with the Yahoo.Pipes service, I dared to share some things, including solving a number of problems that a novice “pipe guide” (or “pipe guide”) may encounter. Well, the main message that prompted me to write this post was, first of all, not to forget about these things myself, and if anything, always be able to check.

    As usual, a small digression. Yahoo.Pipes is an amazing service that allows you to do various useful and interesting things with rss feeds (rss streams) (strictly speaking, not only with rss, but also xml, csv data, web pages, other Internet services and etc. - the main thing is that they can be accessed via the web). You can combine several rss-channels into one, on the contrary, you can divide, and then mix again, sort in various ways, add something, reduce something, etc., etc.

    Most importantly, it is implemented through a web interface and in a visual form. In other words, you don’t need to essentially program anything and invent it yourself. all that is required is to know what modules exist, how to handle them and what they can (RTFM, of course, no one canceled), and basic knowledge of regular expressions will also greatly help (again, if you want to make complex pipes ", For the simple, sorry for taftalogy - everything is much simpler). The output is an rss stream or a json file, which is also available remotely and is constantly updated.

    The advantages of the service are obvious - as I said, you do not need to program anything, you do not need to host any scripts, you don’t have to worry about caching and traffic either - Yahoo.Pipes takes care of all this

    Over the past 2 years of its existence, the service has matured, new convenient “features” have appeared, and, of course, there are also all kinds of bugs, errors that are poorly documented (therefore, the solution is not immediately found), or simply make you climb the wall (“ I’m doing everything as in the manual, but no, it’s buggy ”). Perhaps this arises from a poor reading of my documentation, however, I will still share my little discoveries and tips. (Once again I note that this article is intended for a less prepared reader who is familiar with the basic modules of Yahoo.Pipes).

    So, to warm up, let's start with a simple one:

    1. It is often required to refer, for example, in the description subelement (description) to another subelement (for example, link). This happens when you want to insert HTML text into the description subelement (say, the link url subelement of the picture, but you want to insert a link to this picture and add a little explanation to it). As a rule, the Regex module is used for this, but the question arises, how in the line where we write what to change for, insert a link to another subelement of the item element?
    To do this, proceed as follows: put the $ sign, then braces {}, and inside them - the name of the subelement without, pay attention to item., That is,
    $ {link}, where link is the name of one of the existing subelements of the element item.

    Full article on my blog

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