How to filter RSS feeds

This is part 1 in a series explaining how pipes works and what you can do with it.

Filtering RSS feeds is the most basic use case for pipes. RSS feeds are everywhere: From your blog to Youtube to your newspaper’s website, if there is a need to see updates there most likely be a RSS feed available. But sometimes it contains entries you are not interested in, or you are really just interested in a specific topic. That’s when you can filter the RSS with pipes.

First prepare loading the feed to be filtered into the editor by placing a feed block:

/blog/upload/filter_feed_start.jpg

Then enter the feed URL. You can have a look at the inspector to check whether data gets properly loaded:

/blog/upload/filter_feed_data.jpg

Next step is the filtering. For that, place a filter block and enter your search term:

/blog/upload/filtered_feed_filter.jpg

Don’t forget to connect it to the red pipe output at the right! We won’t need any additional blocks.

Now only items that contain the filter term are included in the manipulated feed. You can check again with the data inspector:

/blog/upload/fitlered_feed_filter_data.jpg

But maybe it’s the other way around and you want to enter the keyword that should be filtered out, to remove all items that include it? Then click on the checkbox to block found items instead:

/blog/upload/fitlered_feed_block.jpg

You can also limit where to look for the keyword, to for example only filter a specific category:

/blog/upload/filter_fields.jpg

And that’s it! Now the feed provided by pipes will be the original feed, just filtered. You can access it by opening the link to the Pipe Output at the left:

/blog/upload/filtered_feed_preview.jpg

You can find the pipe used in this article here and use it as a starting point for your own filtered RSS feed.

The next article in this series will explain how to combine multiple RSS feeds into one.