Feature Request: File/ImportSubscriptions from an OPML URL as (insert new folder name here)

[drf5n]

I was playing with the File/Import Subscriptions item, and it works just fine from a file.

As-is, NetNewsWire seems to import an OPML file with the foldername derived from the outline:title field. two distinct files from separate sources have the same title, it will merge them in NetNewsWire. You can work around that by editing the OPML files to use different titles.

Two things might be nice:

1. Add a mechanism to override the folder name in the OPML file with a chosen name.
2. Add a mechanism to paste in a URL instead of loading a local file.

These two changes would make it easier to sort of manually subscribe to other folk's OPML files with control of your own folder name space.

If you want to update your copy of someone's feed, you would re-import again with the chosen name, and it merges in the new feeds. To flush out any dropped feeds, delete the folder and re-import, and NNW remembers all the already-seen feeds.

Oh, a third thing -- if you happen to drag-and-drop a URL into NNW and it tries to make a feed, but fails because you dropped in a URL to a subscription OPML file, import it as a subscription file.

[drf5n]

Here's a python script to parse an URL and write it as a file with an edited title for NNW importing:

#!/usr/bin/python3

import requests
import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
import argparse
parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(formatter_class=argparse.ArgumentDefaultsHelpFormatter)
parser.add_argument("url",help="OPML URL",default="http://insert.your/feed/here.xml")
parser.add_argument("-t","--title",help="outline title ",default="00_junk_folder")
parser.add_argument("-o","--output",help="output file ",default="00_junk_folder.xml")

path = ".//outline"

args=parser.parse_args()

response = requests.get(args.url)
tree = ET.ElementTree(ET.fromstring(response.content)) # tricky -- promote an element to an ElementTree

topOutline = tree.find(path)
topOutline.set('title', args.title)
print(ET.tostring(topOutline))

tree.write(args.output,encoding="utf-8")

With this, one could script a couple OPMLs into local files with controlled titles for importing into NNW

[brentsimmons]

You can also create multiple On My Mac accounts and give them different names and import a different OPML file into each.

[drf5n]

Oh, under NetNewsWire/Settings/Account -- This 20yr user does not remember exploring the Accounts tab.

[drf5n]

I see: "Make Import OPML from URL work" #136