Error parsing an empty feed

[felixZmn]

Hey!

To get feed metadata from an feed URL I try to parse the feed and extract the data from the result. Most of the time this approach works flawless.

Now, I stumbled across the following feed:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<rss version="2.0">
    <channel>
        <title>netcup Deals</title>
        <link>https://www.netcup.com/de/</link>
        <description>Entdecke unschlagbare netcup Rabatte und Special Editions – spare bei regelmäßigen Aktionen auf Webhosting, Server und Domains oder erhalte mehr Leistung für gleichbleibenden Preis.</description>
        <lastBuildDate>Mon, 16 Feb 2026 19:36:04 GMT</lastBuildDate>
        <docs>https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/rss2.html</docs>
        <generator>https://github.com/jpmonette/feed</generator>
        <language>de</language>
        <image>
            <title>netcup Deals</title>
            <url>https://www.netcup.com/deals.svg</url>
            <link>https://www.netcup.com/de/</link>
        </image>
        <copyright>Alle Rechte vorbehalten 2026, https://www.netcup.com</copyright>
    </channel>
</rss>

The metadata is there and it is an valid feed. The tricky part: The feed contains no items.
Calling now new RssReader().read("<path>").toList() on this feed returns an empty list - and I have no chance of accessing the feed metadata. Is there an other way of getting the feed metadata I am not aware of or is this just not possible?

Thanks in advance for your time & help
Felix

[w3stling]

Hi Felix,

Thank you for the detailed report and for providing the sample feed.

At the moment, it is not possible to retrieve channel metadata when the feed contains no items. If the RSS feed does not include any <item> elements, read(...).toList() will return an empty list, and the channel information is therefore not exposed.

I will address this limitation in a future release so that channel metadata can also be accessed even when the feed has no items.

Thanks again for pointing this out!