Note: 59

I ran into a problem today, where I was trying to get a list of all the episodes of the Shelved By Genre podcast, to see which I might want to listen to.

Their website didn’t have the full list, and while Spotify did, Spotify’s information-sparse UI meant I had to scroll for what felt like forever to get all the titles.

I ended up going to the podcast’s RSS feed, which had all the info I needed in one convenient place! But how to turn the XML into the list I wanted?

My first instinct was regex, and that would’ve worked, but then I remembered that the browser has a built-in XML parser!

Enter the following into your browser dev console (which you can open from the RSS page itself), and voilà!

const xml = `paste xml here`;
const parser = new DOMParser();
const titles = [
    ...parser
      .parseFromString(xml, 'text/xml')
      .querySelectorAll('item title')
  ]
  .map(x => x.innerHTML)
  .join('\n');

copy(titles);