Many web sites now include a simple way to autodiscover the RSS feed for the site. This is done via a simple LINK tag and is supported by all the modern browsers. You should see - for example - a RSS icon in the address bar at this blog because I have the following HTML in my HEAD block:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="http://feedproxy.google.com/RaymondCamdensColdfusionBlog" />

I was talking to Todd Sharp today about how ColdFusion could look for this URL and I came up with the following snippet.

<cfset urls = ["http://www.raymondcamden.com", "http://www.coldfusionbloggers.org", "http://www.androidgator.com", "http://www.cfsilence.com/blog/client"]>

<cfloop index="u" array="#urls#"> <cfoutput>Checking #u#<br/></cfoutput>

<cfhttp url="#u#"> <cfset body = cfhttp.fileContent> <cfset linkTags = reMatch("<link[^>]+type=""application/rss+xml"".?>",body)> <cfif arrayLen(linkTags)> <cfset rssLinks = []> <cfloop index="ru" array="#linkTags#"> <cfif findNoCase("href=", ru)> <cfset arrayAppend(rsslinks, rereplaceNoCase(ru,".href=""(.?)"".", "\1"))> </cfif> </cfloop> <cfdump var="#rsslinks#" label="RSS Links"> <cfelse> None found. </cfif> <p/> </cfloop>

The snippet begins with a few sample URLs I used for testing. We then loop over each and perform a HTTP get. From this we can then use some regex to find link tags. You can have more than one so I create an array for my results and append to it the URLs I find within them. Nice and simple, right? You could also turn this into a simple UDF:

<cfscript> function getRSSUrl(u) { var h = new com.adobe.coldfusion.http(); h.setURL(arguments.u); h.setMethod("get"); h.setResolveURL(true); var result = h.send().getPrefix().fileContent; var rssLinks = []; var linkTags = reMatch("<link[^>]+type=""application/rss\+xml"".*?>",result);

if(arrayLen(linkTags)) { var rssLinks = []; for(var ru in linkTags) { if(findNoCase("href=", ru)) arrayAppend(rsslinks, rereplaceNoCase(ru,".href=""(.?)"".*", "\1")); } } return rssLinks;
} </cfscript>

Not sure how useful this is - but enjoy!