Pod⭐

Podstar is a Python library for working with podcasts. It optimizes for robustness, efficiency, and standards support while providing a clean and simple API. Podstar has some neat features:

• robust parsing of RSS-based podcast feeds
• transparent use of paginated feeds (via RSS pagination)
• support for HTTP caching headers (ETag or Last-Modified), enabling long-running aggregator processes to request as little data as possible
• easy access to audio information, including:
  • duration (as determined by iTunes DTD metadata when available, or by streaming audio files to memory until necessary metadata is available)
  • bitrate
  • sample rate

Getting Started

Ensure that you've got Python >= 3.3 installed, and a new Python virtual environment activated. Install the library using:

$ pip install podstar

You're done!

Using Podstar

The following code iterates over a podcast feed, listing each episode and its duration:

import time
import podstar

feed = podstar.Feed('http://feeds.sceneonradio.org/SceneOnRadio')

# print some information about the podcast, including a text description (HTML in the description will be removed automatically)
print(feed.title)
print(feed.description + "\n")

# list each episode with its title, date published, and duration
for episode in feed.episodes():
    pub_date = episode.published_at.strftime("%a %b %d, %Y")
    duration = time.strftime("%H:%M:%S", time.gmtime(episode.duration))
    print(f"– \"{episode.title}\" ({pub_date}) [{duration}]")

For further examples of how to use Podstar, see the examples/ directory.

Development

Getting started with development on Podstar is relatively straightforward.

Ensure that you have Python >= 3.3 installed, clone the repository, and cd to it

$ git clone <repo url>
$ cd podstar/

Use pip to install the dependencies specified in requirements.txt (if you haven't already) as well as the development dependencies specified in dev_requirements.txt

$ pip install -r requirements.txt
$ pip install -r dev_requirements.txt

To run all tests, execute

$ python -m pytest tests

To check test coverage, execute:

python -m pytest --cov=podstar --cov-report term-missing -s tests

Examples

examples/download.py – The original sketch used when designing the API for this library. Run it from the project's root directory by executing:

$ python -m examples.sketch

examples/crawl.py – Parses a good number of feeds in parallel using digitalpodcast.com as a convenient redirect. From the project's root directory, try it (on a decent internet connection) by executing:

$ python -m examples.crawl