Podcast RSS Feeds From iTunes

Introduction

Podcasts are typically distributed through RSS feeds, which is an extension onto XML. These will include episode titles, description, category, and more. Podcasts will submit their RSS feeds to different platforms like iTunes, Google Podcasts, and many independent sites.

The goal of this will be use the iTunes API and iTunes RSS Generator to get a list podcasts, then get the RSS feed for each.

To do this the R package jsonlite will be used to parse the JSON requests.

List of Podcasts

To get the list of podcasts, the iTunes RSS Generator is used. Setting the parameters on the site,

• Country: United States
• Media Type: Podcasts
• Feed Type: Top Podcasts
• Genre: All
• Results limit: 100
• Format: JSON
• Allow explicit: Yes

produces the following:

https://rss.itunes.apple.com/api/v1/us/podcasts/top-podcasts/all/100/explicit.json

Using this, we can start the process:

library(jsonlite) # load package

podcasts <- fromJSON("https://rss.itunes.apple.com/api/v1/us/podcasts/top-podcasts/all/100/explicit.json")

The results are a list containing the header information related to the query and a data frame of the results we want.

podcastList <- podcasts$feed$results
knitr::kable(head(podcastList), align = "c")

Podcast RSS Feeds from Podcast List

Now that we have the list of podcasts, we need to get the RSS feed for each one. To do this, we can use the iTunes API by using the id found in the url.

## Extract id
extractId <- function(appleLink) {
  id <- regmatches(appleLink, regexpr("(id\\d+)", appleLink)) # probably way to do this with gsub
  id <- gsub("id", "", id)
  return(id)
}

## Lookup by id
findRssById <- function(appleId) {
  apRes <- fromJSON(paste0("https://itunes.apple.com/lookup?entity=podcast&id=",appleId))
  return(apRes$results$feedUrl[1])
}

Now, we can extract the id and query the iTunes lookup and it will return the RSS feed of the podcast. To do this, we loop over the podcast list and create a new dataframe with a bit of info.

df <- NULL
for (k in 1:nrow(podcastList)) {
  df <- rbind(df, data.frame(podcast=podcastList$name[k], artist=podcastList$artistName[k], feed=findRssById(extractId(podcastList$url[k]))))
  Sys.sleep(0.5)
}

This will give us the RSS feeds for each of the top 100 podcasts found on iTunes.

knitr::kable(df, align="c")