Would there ever be a case where there is a stray left bracket (<)? For example, if there is an unbalanced tag or a tag within a tag such as '<<tag1> tag2>' then the parser would grab 'tag2' when it really shouldn't.

By the way, should I even be testing these auxiliary methods?
https://github.com/Freeseer/freeseer/blob/master/src/freeseer/framework/rss_parser.py#L128