Synonymizer/Rewriter

The built-in synonymizer replaces words and phrases with alternatives from your own table. It needs no external service and costs nothing per post. Use it to vary wording, to fix recurring terms, or to remove unwanted text.

Global synonym table

Open RSS Retriever › Synonymizer/Rewriter, write one entry per line into Global synonym table and click Update options. Items in a line are separated by |.

The first character of a line decides how it works:

Line	What happens	Where
`big\|large\|huge`	A synonym group. Every occurrence of any item is replaced with a random item of the group.	Text only, whole words, any letter case
`>car\|automobile\|vehicle`	One-way. Only the first item (`car`) is searched and replaced with one of the others.	Text only, whole words, any letter case
`\|Read more\|Continue reading\|Full story`	One-way, exact. The text after the first `\|` is replaced with one of the following items.	Everywhere, HTML included, exact letter case
`\|Sponsored content`	Removal. The text is deleted wherever it appears.	Everywhere, HTML included, exact letter case

Details:

“Text only, whole words” means a match must be surrounded by spaces, brackets, punctuation or tag borders, so car does not change scary, and text inside HTML attributes is not touched.
For text-only lines the letter case of the found word is kept: Big becomes Large, BIG becomes LARGE.
Items can be phrases: in addition|furthermore|moreover.
To use a literal | character inside an item, write \|.
In a removal line (|text) the text is used as a regular expression, so characters such as ., ( or ? have a special meaning. Escape them with \ to match them literally.

big|large|huge|massive
quickly|rapidly|swiftly
>smartphone|mobile phone|handset
|<p>Follow us on social media</p>
|Click here|Learn more|Read the full story

External synonym table

Instead of entries, the table can contain a single line with the URL or the server path of a plain text file with the entries, for example https://example.com/synonyms.txt. The file is loaded when a feed is processed. This lets several sites share one table.

Using the synonymizer in a feed

The table is used by feeds whose Built-in synonymizer option on the Advanced tab is not disabled:

Use built-in synonymizer before content spinner: your table runs first, then the spinner.
Use built-in synonymizer after content spinner (default): the spinner runs first, then your table. Good for fixing words the spinner tends to get wrong.

Titles are synonymized too, unless Don’t synonymize titles is ticked.

Clean-up tool, not only a rewriter

Exact | lines are a quick way to remove boilerplate that many feeds append, such as “The post ... appeared first on ...”, or to replace a brand name with your own.