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   5                 <title>Yara: Yet Anoter RSS Aggregator</title>
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  15                 <h1>Yara: Yet Another RSS Aggregator</h1>
  16                 <p>Yara is a fast, embeddable RSS aggregator and parser. It is written in C++ and exposes a very simple API in C.</p>
  17                 <p>Yara is designed to be as fast as possible, yet be usable and maintainable. Some of the choices for the parser and the renderer were made uniquely for speed:
  18                 <ul>
  19                         <li>Yara uses the Expat XML parser, which is the fastest XML parser I know.<br/>
  20                         Though Expat is neither a SAX nor a DOM parser, it suits its purpose exactly and is the de-facto standard for fast XML parsing.</li>
  21                         <li>Yara uses <i>templates</i> for rendering, in which it replaces tags with the contents of what it found in the RSS stream.<br/>
  22                         To render an RSS stream, it searches in the template for tags that look like this: <span class="code">$$__tagname__$$</span>. It then
  23                         uses a perfect hash, generated by GNU gperf, to look up the function to use to insert whatever the tag corresponds to, and inserts
  24                         whatever needs inserting.<br/>
  25                         This means that this RSS renderer doesn't necessarily render RSS into HTML: you could, if you wanted, use it to generate C code that
  26                         statically contains the RSS feed.</li>
  27                 </ul>
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  29                 <p>Parsing is done in two steps: first, the RSS stream is parsed, then the template is used to generate a header, each item found in the stream,
  30                 and a footer. The template therefore consists of a template text for all three.</p>
  31                 <p>Yara will not download the stream for you: most RAD tools, frameworks, etc. come with easy-to-use methods to download files from the internet,
  32                 so I didn't see an immediate need to implement this.</p>
  33                 <p>Yara comes with an example application, which is a stand-alone RSS viewer written in Turbo C++. The viewer loads the parser/renderer DLL
  34                 dynamically, which is intended to demonstrate not only that the DLL can be compiled with a different C++ compiler, but that it can be used as
  35                 a plug-in for <em>your</em> applications.</p>
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