Testing for Existence¶

Feeds in the real world may be missing elements, even elements that are required by the specification. You should always test for the existence of an element before getting its value. Never assume an element is present.

To test whether elements exist, you can use standard Python dictionary idioms.

>>> import feedparser
>>> d = feedparser.parse('http://feedparser.org/docs/examples/atom10.xml')
>>> 'title' in d.feed
True
>>> 'ttl' in d.feed
False
>>> d.feed.get('title', 'No title')
u'Sample feed'
>>> d.feed.get('ttl', 60)
60