Belatedly: blogged some #Python decorator advice: (Also recently a gripe on list comprehensions: )

Belatedly: blogged some #Python decorator advice: (Also recently a gripe on list comprehensions: )

Cute #Python trick: Python objects that act like Javascript objects:

Excellent article on best practises for #Python datetimes (from July last year):

Might be time to revisit my accounting app: #python on #android

@idangazit I made this chart of related operations: (Someday may pack them all into a single utility.)

Pexpect:
Pexpect is a pure Python module that makes Python a better tool for controlling and automating other programs… Pexpect is basically a pattern matching system. It runs programs and watches output. When output matches a given pattern Pexpect can respond as if a human were typing responses.

This pushes *lots* of my buttons: #3dprinting #crowdfunding #alife #python (!) #wunderkammer

ScraperWiki:
ScraperWiki is a platform for writing and scheduling screen scrapers, and for storing the data they generate.

ScraperWiki lets you write your scraper in Python, PHP or Ruby, schedule scrapes and download scraped data in CSV format, as an SQLite3 database or via the API. You can fork existing scrapers too, Github-style.

Let’s say you wanted to grab all the URLs from link posts on the front page of One Thing Well and store them. Here’s how, in Python:

import scraperwiki
import lxml.html

root = scraperwiki.scrape('http://onethingwell.org/')
content = lxml.html.etree.HTML(root)
linkage = content.xpath("/html/body/div/article/h2/a/@href")

for links in linkage:
record = { "link" : links }
scraperwiki.datastore.save(["link"], record)

You can see the results on ScraperWiki.

And here’s another scraper—a bit more complex at 26 lines of code—which grabs the URLs from every link post on OTW by following the ‘Older’ link at the bottom of the page and parsing the next page until it reaches the last one.

I only know the very, very basics of Python, but the above scrapers were really easy to cobble together by following nicking code from the ScraperWiki tutorials and a bit of trial and error.

Have a go, and let me know if you make a cool scraper.

Hilariously tone-deaf complaint about #python complex number syntax: [via @stevelosh ]

@szopa not so fast! #emacs claims #python and #ruby extensibility: ("sensible" I admit I don't know)

Some really nice #Python idioms/tricks: (perhaps a little outdated in a few cases)

Antiquariaat specialising in flower books. Den Haag.

System for developing and distributing multiplayer games. Zarf is involved.

Rapidfire developement postmortem -- mentions a few handy-looking Python tools (the game is called Hackenslash, 40 hrs dev time in 2005)

Some static checking of Python code (I can't believe mis-spelled assignment statements silently introduce variables!).