June 23, 2010

Exporting Mail.app XML Feeds to Google Reader

RSS feeds are awesome for keeping up-to-date on the latest news and posts from your favourite sites. Up until now I’ve been using Mail.app as my primary RSS reader—and I really like it—but with an iPad and an iPhone always nearby, I’ve been meaning to set up Reeder instead.

Reeder uses Google Reader as a backend but there wasn’t an easy way to export my Mail.app RSS feeds into Google Reader—until I wrote the little script below to do it for me.

This PHP script reads the Mail.app settings and generates a MailAppToGoogleReader.opml file suitable for importing directly into Google Reader’s settings pane. All you have to do is copy the script to a file such as MailToGoogleReader.php and run the Terminal command:

$ php -e MailToGoogleReader.php

Now I can sit back and relax with Reeder on the iPad.

<?php

$opml = '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<opml version="1.0">
<head>
<dateCreated>'.date('d-M-Y').'</dateCreated>
</head>
<body>
';

foreach (glob("/Users/jsambells/Library/Mail/RSS/*/Info.plist") as $plist) {
    $xml = new SimpleXmlElement(file_get_contents($plist));
    $results = $xml->xpath('//plist/dict[1]/key[.="RSSFeedURLString"]/following-sibling::*[1]/text()');
    $url = (string)$results[0][0];

    $opml .= '<outline type="rss" xmlUrl="' . $url . '"/>' . "\n";
}

$opml .= '
</body>
</head>
';

file_put_contents( "MailAppToGoogleReader.opml", $opml );

echo "done!";
`open .`;

UPDATED:

Mail.app in Mountain Lion no longer supports RSS feeds so use this to grab all your feeds before you upgrade. I’ve also copied the above to a Gist so you can improve it as necessary: