Count Items in a RSS/Atom Feed using .NET

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Given a RSS or Atom Feed URL, here’s a simple way to count the number of items in the feed. We will use the DevCurry.com RSS Feed and a sample Atom Feed for our example.

using System;
using System.Linq;
using System.ServiceModel.Syndication;
using System.Xml;

public partial class _Default : System.Web.UI.Page
{
    protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        string urlRss = "http://feeds.feedburner.com/devcurry";
        Response.Write("Number of Items in RSS Feed " + urlRss +
            " is " + numberOfItems(urlRss) + "<br /><br />");

        string urlAtom = "http://alexharden.org/blog/atom.xml";
        Response.Write("Number of Items in Atom Feed " + urlAtom +
            " is " + numberOfItems(urlAtom));
    }

    private int numberOfItems(string feedUrl)
    {
        using (XmlReader reader = XmlReader.Create(feedUrl))
        {
            return(SyndicationFeed.Load(reader).Items.Count());
        }
    }
}

The SyndicationFeed class available in .NET 3.5 and .NET 4.0 is very useful in such scenarios since it can represent both Atom 1.0 and RSS 2.0.

OUTPUT

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About The Author

Suprotim Agarwal, Developer Technologies MVP (Microsoft Most Valuable Professional) is the founder and contributor for DevCurry, DotNetCurry and SQLServerCurry. He is the Chief Editor of a Developer Magazine called DNC Magazine. He has also authored two Books - 51 Recipes using jQuery with ASP.NET Controls. and The Absolutely Awesome jQuery CookBook.

Follow him on twitter @suprotimagarwal.