# 2025-12-29 13:37:00.133769 UTC (+0000)

sfeed 2.3 was released.

sfeed is a tool to convert RSS or Atom feeds from XML to a TAB-separated file.

It can be found at:
  * git://git.codemadness.org/sfeed
  * gopher://codemadness.org/1/git/sfeed
  * https://codemadness.org/releases/sfeed/
  * gopher://codemadness.org/1/releases/sfeed/

sfeed has the following changes compared to 2.2:


For this release if you use sfeed_mbox: because of some changes the Message-ID
value will be different. This may be important for example if you use this
header for filtering duplicate messages.

See below for detailed information.


Fixes:

* sfeed_update: when merging a record: change the default to use the last record

  In many cases it makes sense to use the last record (merged by default based
  on the combination id, title, link).
    
  Thanks Ivo Cicchese for the feedback!

* sfeed_mbox:
  * The To header could contain characters that are invalid.
  * The Message-ID field could contain spaces or invalid characters. Now it is
    "@newsfeed.local".

* Documentation: sfeed_update/sfeedrc example: use $basename variable name:
  $filename was incorrectly used as it is set in the global scope.
  Use the intended $basename in the scope of the fetch() function.


Features

* sfeed_gopher: improve output and nicer formatting of the index file.
  * Prefix feeds with new items with "N " at the start of the line.
  * Right align item counts, similar to the (left) feed sidebar in sfeed_curses.

* sfeed_mbox:

  * Header changes:
    This allows more convenient filtering in many mail clients.
    
    Add mail headers, they are now only set headers when they have a value and are
    non-empty.
    
    These headers are used by the rss2email program also:
    
    - X-RSS-ID: the item ID.
    - X-RSS-TAGS: the category tags, '|' in sfeed(5) is replaced by ','.
    - X-RSS-URL: the item link / URL.
    
    Also added:
    
    - X-RSS-Author: the item author.
    - X-RSS-Enclosure: the first enclosure.
   
    One can further manipulate the headers using mail tools or awk or a sed
    expression for example.  For example changing X-Feedname to X-Label etc.

   * Change the default From and To header. It does not use the system hostname or
     $USER anymore.
    
     Add environment variables to override the From and To header with defaults:
    
            $SFEED_MBOX_FROM: <anonymous@localhost>
            $SFEED_MBOX_TO:   <anonymous@localhost>

   * Set the author as the displayed name (if it is set), but do not use the
     feed name anymore.
     Some unsafe characters are now removed from the author name (e-mail quoting
     and text encoding).

* Various small code cleanups and documentation improvements:
  * xml.c: validate numeric entities more strictly.
  * Handle unlikely case argc < 1 in programs.
  * Fix some pedantic warnings suggested by cppcheck.


Thanks for the feedback.
If you see bugs please report them.

Happy holidays and happy-hacking 2026,

Hiltjo