it.gen.nz

Writings on technology and society from Wellington, New Zealand

Friday, September 26, 2008

Python script to put sound file links into blog

Here’s the script I wrote to scrape links to the sound files of my radio programmes and add them to this blog.

#!/usr/bin/env python

# some modules we will need
import re, urllib, wordpresslib, time

# the blog in question
blogaddr = "https://it.gen.nz/"

# the page with the sound file links on it
linkspage = "http://radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/ninetonoon"

# look on RNZ site for linsk to my sound files. Kep checking until they are up
links = []
while len(links)<2:
	
	page = urllib.urlopen(linkspage).read()	
# use re (Regex) module to find links to sound files with "New_Tech" in their names
	links = re.findall(r'"http\S*?echnology\S*?"',page)

# line added Feb 09 to weed out any other links in the file which are not to sound files
	links = [l for l in links if l[-5:-1] in [".ogg",".mp3"]]


# if we haven't found the links they aren't up yet. Wait a minute and try again
	if len(links)<2:
		
		time.sleep(60)

# there should be two links - Ogg then MP3 - assemble these into an 
# HTML fragment to be inserted into the blog
linktext = ' <a href='+links[0]+'>ogg</a> or <a href='+links[1]+'>mp3</a>'

# Blog processing - set up wordpresslib blog client object
blog = wordpresslib.WordPressClient(blogaddr+"/xmlrpc.php","colin",PASSWORD)
blog.selectBlog(0)

# now get the most recent post
post = blog.getLastPost()

# and check that it has a 'download the audio' bit, but no links yet
frags = re.split(r'download the audio',post.description)
if len(frags)>1:

# graft in the HTML fragment we created
	post.description = frags[0]+'download the audio as' + linktext + "."
	
# post it back to the blog
	blog.editPost(post.id,post,1)
posted by colin at 7:30 am  

2 Comments

  1. […] So, the revised program – the one that worked – looked like this. […]

    Pingback by it.gen.nz » A little programming project, part 2 — 26 September 2008 @ 7:33 am

  2. […] posted the listing of the program, which is a Python script, here. Given the messiness of what it’s doing there seem to be indecently few lines of actual code. […]

    Pingback by it.gen.nz » A little programming project - part 3 — 20 October 2008 @ 12:25 am

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