How can I keep XHTML markup in the RSS output from Yahoo Pipes

Question

I am using yahoo pipes to aggregate a variety of rss feeds (and make some simple transformations, etc). However, the XHTML content of my feeds is stripped away by the aggregation process. The problem seems to have nothing to do with my pipes code, and simply be a result of how Yahoo Pipes transforms the input RSS I am feeding it into the output RSS it spits out -- though both are apparently RSS, they are quite different XML files.

So, for example, when the "input" rss looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<feed>...
  <entry>
 ...
     <title>...</title>
<content type="xhtml">
 HTML CONTENT HERE
</content>
  </entry>
  ...
</feed>

The output looks like this:

<rss xmlns:geo="http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#" xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/" xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/" xmlns:yt="http://gdata.youtube.com/schemas/2007" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" version="2.0">
  <channel>
   <title></title>
   <description></description>
   <link>
   </link>
   ...
   <item>
      <title>...</title>
      ...
      <description>
          NON HTML CONTENT HERE
      </description>
      ...
   </item>
  </channel>
</rss>

It seems that the problem is that the contents of the <content> tag in my input are being converted into a <description> tag in the yahoo rss output, and from what I looked up, the <description> tag does not support markup within it, so it makes sense that that content is plain text.

My problem is that I can't find any documentation of why Yahoo is making this transformation or how to avoid it. It is nothing that I can find in my pipe, but on the other hand, I can't find a way to access an un-transformed version of my pipe's output. It seems I must be missing something because obviously people use embedded HTML in RSS all the time and I can't imagine it's all being squashed in every pipe out there.

Here is the link to a minimal test case in which I pull in a single feed and output it again with Yahoo pipes: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=5302fba3cc2d02f7a87ffdded87ce627

Can anyone tell me how to modify the above test pipe so that it will spit out content with html in it? Alternatively, can anyone explain if/why this is impossible to do?

Joel Joel · Accepted Answer · 2013-08-23T16:57:51

AFAIK you can't get raw feed output as XML - Yahoo! shoehorns your output into specific standard RSS fields, as you noticed. The best option that I can think of is to get your output as json (a javascript object), as the json preserves all the fields in the input: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=5302fba3cc2d02f7a87ffdded87ce627&_render=json Most modern processors will take json output in addition to RSS.

How can I keep XHTML markup in the RSS output from Yahoo Pipes

1 Answers