XML::RSS::Parser is a lightweight liberal parser of RSS feeds. This parser is "liberal" in that it does not demand compliance of a specific RSS version and will attempt to gracefully handle tags it does not expect or understand. The parser's only requirements is that the file is well-formed XML and remotely resembles RSS. Roughly speaking, well formed XML with a channel element as a direct sibling or the root tag and item elements etc. There are a number of advantages to using this module then just using a standard parser-tree combination. There are a number of different RSS formats in use today. In very subtle ways these formats are not entirely compatible from one to another. XML::RSS::Parser makes a couple assumptions to "normalize" the parse tree into a more consistent form. For instance, it forces channel and item into a parent-child relationship.