Parsing a PodCast in C#

Recently I assimilated the Windows Media Player into one of my projects, today I decided to add PodCast capabilities.

I was surprised how easy this was, I guess I’d expected more of a challenge. I went into this knowing nothing about PodCasts, once I realized it was RSS I knew this would be easy. RSS used to be Rich Site Summary, until people figured out how useful it was and renamed it Really Simple Syndication.

I know this is really simple code, frankly that’s part of why I’m posting it. Simple examples save people time. I tried to find a quick Copy+Paste solution for Podcasts on Google just before I wrote this. After three minutes of searching I quit and spent five writing this.

The example I wrote is a console application (yes, it runs from the DOS prompt) that grabs a Podcast page and loops through all the Podcast listings. I use console apps for examples because there isn’t a lot too them. This helps coders quickly Copy+Paste the code they need from my examples.

So without further adieu, this is how simple it is to do Podcasts in C#…

//This is always included in Console applications.
using System;

//This contains the XmlDocument, XmlNodeList and Node objects used below.
using System.Xml;

namespace ExamplePodCastParser
{

class Program
{

static void Main(string[] args)
{

//This loads the Podcast
XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();
doc.Load(“http://obama.senate.gov/podcast/index.xml”);

//This builds a list of the Item nodes
XmlNodeList items = doc.SelectNodes(“//item”);

//This loops through the list and writes out the title and URL.
for (int i = 0; i < items.Count; i++)
{
Console.WriteLine(items[i].SelectSingleNode(“title”).InnerText);
Console.WriteLine(items[i].SelectSingleNode(“enclosure”).Attributes[“url”].Value);
}

}

}

}

 

Click here to download the Visual Studio project.