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A while ago, I wrote a post about using ruby to parse the xml feed of shared starred items in Google Reader. One thing that I did not like about this solution was that I could not get the URL AND mark the item as un-starred. Since I had been playing with REST in these two prior posts, I figured I could re-write my code to pull down starred item’s URLs, and mark them as un-starred. I wanted to eliminate ruby, as I just don’t use it that often and I feel like I am re-inventing the wheel every time. This too a lot longer than I thought it would, but I figured it out (I think)

As this article explains, you can share out your Google reader starred items. First step was the find the needed values from this XML feed and put the values into variables. I turned to xpath (xpath is installed by default on OS X, it is part of the Perl library XML::XPath).

For the second part of this tutorial, where we mark the item as “un-starred”, we need 2 variables form the Xml feed: id & source. My end goal was to put these URLs into Together.app, so I needed the URL too. Title was just for fun.

Here is the non ruby code to pull the variables that I needed out of the XML of the shared starred items in Google Reader.

XML=$(curl -s http://www.google.com/reader/public/atom/user/YOURUSERID/state/com.google/starred?n=1 | xmllint --format -)
OBJID=$(echo "$XML" | xpath "//entry/id" 2>/dev/null | awk -F"[<>]" '{print $3}')
TITLE=$(echo "$XML" | xpath "//entry/title" 2>/dev/null | awk -F"[<>]" '{print $3}')
URL=$(echo "$XML" | xpath "//entry/link/@href" 2>/dev/null | sed 's/\"//g' | sed 's/href\=//g' | sed 's/\ //g')
SOURCE=$(echo "$XML" | xpath "//entry/source/@gr:stream-id" 2>/dev/null | sed "s/gr:stream-id=//g" | sed "s/\"//g" | sed 's/\ //g')

After getting those variables, I wanted to put the URL in together.app (this has not changed since the previous post). Here is that code:

echo "Adding $TITLE to Together"
osascript << EOT
tell application "Together" to import url "$URL" as web PDF
EOT