You’re completely right about the spare “links” line. And also, of course, about the way I chose to implement getting a web page – I know that a file object is created, but I’m not interested in it and I’m delighted to let Python clean it up for me. All I want is the contents of the web page in a form I can manipulate.

Cheers

Colin

page = urllib.urlopen(linkspage).read()

the urllib.urlopen call is returning a file object; you call this read() method to obtain the contents, then discard the object, whereupon Python’s memory management will automatically close it. May horrify some people used to having to explicitly close every file they open, but it works!

Just a stylistic matter, I would prefer to write the while-loop as follows:

while True :
page = urllib.urlopen(linkspage).read()
links = re.findall(r’”http\S*?echnology\S*?”‘,page)
if len(links) >= 2 :
break
time.sleep(60)

saves checking len(links) twice. Also you have a line that just says

links

which I don’t think is doing anything useful, and can be removed.