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apigoogle-reader

Google Reader API Unread Count

Does Google Reader have an API and if so, how can I get the count of the number of unread posts for a specific user knowing their username and password?

Solution

  • This URL will give you a count of unread posts per feed. You can then iterate over the feeds and sum up the counts.

    http://www.google.com/reader/api/0/unread-count?all=true

    Here is a minimalist example in Python...parsing the xml/json and summing the counts is left as an exercise for the reader:

    import urllib
import urllib2

username = 'username@gmail.com'
password = '******'

# Authenticate to obtain SID
auth_url = 'https://www.google.com/accounts/ClientLogin'
auth_req_data = urllib.urlencode({'Email': username,
                                  'Passwd': password,
                                  'service': 'reader'})
auth_req = urllib2.Request(auth_url, data=auth_req_data)
auth_resp = urllib2.urlopen(auth_req)
auth_resp_content = auth_resp.read()
auth_resp_dict = dict(x.split('=') for x in auth_resp_content.split('\n') if x)
auth_token = auth_resp_dict["Auth"]

# Create a cookie in the header using the SID 
header = {}
header['Authorization'] = 'GoogleLogin auth=%s' % auth_token

reader_base_url = 'http://www.google.com/reader/api/0/unread-count?%s'
reader_req_data = urllib.urlencode({'all': 'true',
                                    'output': 'xml'})
reader_url = reader_base_url % (reader_req_data)
reader_req = urllib2.Request(reader_url, None, header)
reader_resp = urllib2.urlopen(reader_req)
reader_resp_content = reader_resp.read()

print reader_resp_content

    And some additional links on the topic: