Script to Extract RSS Feed URL from Apple Podcasts

I’ll introduce a script to extract RSS feed URLs from Apple Podcasts.

Extract RSS Feed URL Only with curl + egrep

curl -s "https://podcasts.apple.com/jp/podcast/podcast-name/podcast-id" \
  | egrep -o 'https?://[^"]+(/rss|\.rss)'

Here’s an explanation of the script:

Script Explanation

This script makes it easy to extract RSS feed URLs for podcasts on Apple Podcasts. Podcast RSS feeds are essential elements for automatically updating episodes.

Introduction to Command Line Tools

This script uses two command line tools: curl and egrep.

curl: A tool for retrieving web page content by specifying URLs. Here, it’s used to retrieve Apple Podcasts pages.
egrep: A tool for searching text using regular expressions. In this script, it helps identify URL patterns and extract feed URLs.

Detailed Step-by-Step Explanation

Execute curl command

curl -s "https://podcasts.apple.com/jp/podcast/podcast-name/podcast-id"
- -s means silent mode, preventing display of progress messages. It retrieves HTML data from the specified URL.

Pipe HTML Data Processing and Regular Expression Matching

| egrep -o 'https?://[^"]+(/rss|\.rss)'
- The pipe | passes curl’s output to the next egrep.
- egrep -o is an option that outputs only the matched portions. The regular expression https?://[^"]+(/rss|\.rss) catches the main parts that constitute URLs and extracts those containing /rss or .rss.

Further Applications

This script is very simple but can be applied to other web pages. Customizations are possible to extract feed URLs from other podcast platforms or web pages that provide RSS feeds.

That’s all from the Gemba.