September 17, 2010

• Those Guys

  I think my job is turning me into one of "those guys". Some of you might know what I mean. One of "those guys" that spend all day at work writing computer code, then going home only to do more coding. For example, I just spent the last few minutes writing a script that trawls an RSS feed for updates with a specific string every five minutes. Why? Well, I would tell you the truth, but I think it'd be more entertaining to let your imagination go wild. If you want it, the code is below (it's Python, by the way):

  
  

  import urllib import sys import time from datetime import datetime url = sys.argv[1] thing = raw_input('What do you seek: ') lastDate = '' while True:   try: f = urllib.urlopen(url)   except (IOError): continue   body = f.read()   lines = body.split('n')   for line in lines:      if line.strip().startswith('<pubDate>'):          curDate = line.split('>')[1].split('<')[0]          if curDate == lastDate:             break          else:             if thing in body:                print "OMG! %s has been found!" % thing                sys.exit(1)             else:                print "There's an update, but it's probably nothing special"                lastDate = curDate                break   f.close()   print "%s -- %s" % (lastDate, str(datetime.now()))   time.sleep(300)

  • 9:25 pm
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