These solutions were written and published solely for educational and self-study purposes and are not guaranteed to be correct. I highly encourage you to attempt solving these psets on your own before checking these solutions, and even so, take them with a grain of salt!

As of April 2023, the helper code provided on OCW's website for problem set 5 breaks when trying to run on Python 3.9. Some modifications had to be made to the original code in order to fix it.

Here are some of the issues I found and fixed:

• A deprecated base64 decoding method in the feedparser.py module had to be removed.
• The process() function in ps5.py broke when trying to access the description property for RSS entries. Accessing the summary property instead fixes this.
• The Yahoo News RSS feed endpoint (http://news.yahoo.com/rss/topstories) had to be removed in order avoid breaking the process() function.
• Added more info to the exception handling to the main_thread in ps5.py using the traceback module.

With the changes above, the code now runs fine on Python 3.9 and displays news stories from the Google News RSS feed, using the triggers specified in the triggers.txt file to filter stories.