Filters and Plugins

Filters and plugins are simple Unix pipes. Input comes in stdin, parameters come from the config file, and output goes to stdout. Anything written to stderr is logged as an ERROR message. If no stdout is produced, the entry is not written to the cache or processed further; in fact, if the entry had previously been written to the cache, it will be removed.

There are two types of filters supported by Venus, input and template.

Input to an input filter is a aggressively normalized entry. For example, if a feed is RSS 1.0 with 10 items, the filter will be called ten times, each with a single Atom 1.0 entry, with all textConstructs expressed as XHTML, and everything encoded as UTF-8.

Input to a template filter will be the output produced by the template.

You will find a small set of example filters in the filters directory. The coral cdn filter will change links to images in the entry itself. The filters in the stripAd subdirectory will strip specific types of advertisements that you may find in feeds.

The excerpt filter adds metadata (in the form of a planet:excerpt element) to the feed itself. You can see examples of how parameters are passed to this program in either excerpt-images or opml-top100.ini. Alternately parameters may be passed URI style, for example: excerpt-images2.

The xpath sifter is a variation of the above, including or excluding feeds based on the presence (or absence) of data specified by xpath expressions. Again, parameters can be passed as config options or URI style.

The regexp sifter operates just like the xpath sifter, except it uses regular expressions instead of XPath expressions.

Notes