How to find out default filename of RSS feeds

[Kassey Lee]

When you see an RSS feed URL ending with a directory and then a slash, how can you figure out the actual file of the RSS feed?

For example, this page has a number of RSS feeds. If I click METRO, my Internet Explorer 7 correctly displays an XML file of RSS feeds, and the URL bar shows the address as:

h t t p://www.shanghaidaily.com/rss/Metro/

In the case, what is the actual file of the RSS feeds. I tried the following names and they all failed.

http://www.shanghaidaily.com/rss/Metro/Metro.html
http://www.shanghaidaily.com/rss/Metro/Metro.htm
http://www.shanghaidaily.com/rss/Metro/Metro.xml
http://www.shanghaidaily.com/rss/Metro/Index.html
http://www.shanghaidaily.com/rss/Metro/Index.htm

 

[amoeba]

The address you posted, ending with /Metro/, is the correct url. On the Web, there's not always necessarily a connection between the server's filesystem layout and the URL structure. There's no need to append a filename. If you are saving the results locally, you could save it with a .xml suffix (or whatever suffix you want).

Here's a curl session from my linux box verifying that (see the Content-Type header):

$ curl -LI http://www.shanghaidaily.com/rss/Metro/
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Date: Wed, 11 Aug 2010 06:53:51 GMT
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Content-Length: 32747
Content-Type: text/xml
Set-Cookie: ASPSESSIONIDCQTDSACR=HMAOONPAGGPPIJDPENDCHCHI; path=/
Cache-Control: private
Powered-By-ChinaCache: MISS from USA-NE-1-3H1
Connection: close

 

[Kassey Lee]

Thanks for the explanation. Much appreciated.