Most popular news websites publish their RSS ( Really Simple Syndication ) feeds. If you haven 't heard of RSS,

you may have a look at this article on Wikipedia. In this assignment, y ou are to write a simple RSS News Reader and Aggregator in Perl.

The reader.pl should accept only one command line argument which is the URL of a speci_ed RSS feed. If the RSS feed is valid, all items in the RSS fe ed should be displayed on the screen with the following details:

• Title
• Author* (where exists )
• Date published (where exists)
• Content (description)

In Part B, the script only needs to support one of the following three formats.

• Text (le extension: txt)

The generated text le should look similar to Part A. However, it should also exclude all markups (e.g.
HTML tags) to make the output more readable.

• HTML (le extension: htm or html)

The generated le should be compatible with major browsers (Microsoft Internet Explorer 8+, Firefox
3.6+, and Google Chrome 16+). HTML formats and images from the RSS feeds (wher e exists) should
also be retained.

• RSS (le extension: xml)

The generated RSS feed should at least include the four required elements specied in Part A. In c ase
some of the elements are missing , the aggregated le should still include the missing elem ent(s) but
with an empty value. The generated le should conform to the RSS 2.0 standard.

Part A

Improve your aggregator.pl to support two of the three formats specified in Part B.

Part B

Further improve your aggregator.pl to support all three formats specified in Part B.

In addition, the script should also accept an optional third command line argument which specifies a date in the

format of dd/mm/yyyy. When the argument is provided, e.g.

./aggregator.pl feeds.txt everything.xml 12/03/2012

It should then include only news items published on or after the specified date in the output _le. The time zone in the RSS feeds can be ignored.