Yarssr is not loading the feed, how to fix it

If you add a feed on yarssr and the icon doesn’t turn green, it is time to enable the debug and look for the error. First kill the running process:

$ ps -fea | grep -i yarssr | grep -v grep | awk '{ print $2 }' | xargs kill -9

Then, go to the app folder and start it back w/debug flag:

$ cd ~/.yarssr/;yarssr --debug

HINT, if you happen to have many feeds as me, it might be easier to clean up the config file to only leave the one that is not working. Do a back before that by reading my previous post Yarssr deletes the feeds, how to deal with it.

For me, it was printing:

[17:02:57] 
not well-formed (invalid token) at line 1, column 0, byte 0 at /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/perl5/5.20/XML/Parser.pm line 187.

This indicates the content of the URL is garbled, and it is not being handed correctly to the parser. In my computer, Yarssr is installed on /usr/share/yarssr and there you will find a module called Fetcher. By doing some inspections, it was returning the content without decoding it. The url that I am using (https://kat.cr/etc?rss=1) returns compressed content (use curl or wget)

$ curl -I https://kat.cr/
[...]
Content-Encoding: gzip
[...]

So, I’ve come up with my own _download method within Fetcher.pm. If you plan to use it:

1. Backup the current _download function to _download_old
   • Install Compress::Zlib if you haven’t already. To check if you did:

$ perl -MCompress::Zlib

If you have to install it, just do

$ cpan Compress::Zlib

DISCLAIMER: I haven’t got the change to test against a protected RSS feed, therefore I have not tested the credentials part of the new procedure.

You will need the following moduled to get the procedure working.

use LWP::UserAgent;
use HTTP::Request;
use HTTP::Message;
use Compress::Zlib;

So, my own take of the _download procedure that will allow you to handle encoded content is:

sub _download {
        my ($url,$login) = @_;
        caller eq __PACKAGE__ or die;

        my $can_accept = HTTP::Message::decodable;
        my $agent = LWP::UserAgent->new(env_proxy => 1,keep_alive => 1, timeout => 30,'Accept-Encoding' => $can_accept,agent=>'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:40.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/40.1');
        my $header = HTTP::Request->new(GET => $url);
        my $request = HTTP::Request->new('GET', $url, $header);
        my $response = $agent->request($request);

        if ($login->[0] and $login->[1]) {
                my $username = $login->[0];
                my $pass = $login->[1];
                $request->authorization_basic( "$username", "$pass" );
        }

        # Check the outcome of the response
        my ($content,$type);
        if ($response->is_success){
                ($type) = ($response->headers->{'content-type'}=~/(.*);.*/);
                #$ce = $response->headers->{'content-encoding'};
                $content = $response->decoded_content;
        }elsif ($response->is_error){
                return (0,$response->as_string);
        }
        return $content,$type;
}