For a very long time I've been writing code at my job that automates some very tedious tasks. It's not Python code, though! It's a macro language that has saved the company a lot of time and energy but suffers from severe limitations:

• No scoping -- everything is in a global namespace.
• No functions -- the entire language is based on keywords.
• ( Read more... )

Hey everybody, I'm going to be in Zaltbommel and Waardenburg, Netherlands starting February 4th for two weeks. If anyone would like to get together with me while I'm there, please let me know! I'd be delighted to meet with you, have a drink, and talk about feedparser or Python in general (or anything else for that matter)!

UPDATE: I'm going to be ( Read more... )

I misread a recent feedparser bug report and thought that the author had mistyped a bbcode- or wiki-formatted link. Consequently, I wasted time debugging the code.

Turns out, I wasted a lot of time, because I spent more than zero time debugging the code. Yes, zero time. I was using a conditional breakpoint when I should have been using pdb's ( Read more... )

After going through many, many feedparser bugs (over 100 closed since I started working on the project, with more waiting to be reviewed!) I've seen a lot of reports asking for additional support for various namespaces. Off the top of my head the list includes GeoRSS, the iTunes Music Store (which is different from the iTunes namespace), Google ( Read more... )

One week ago I announced that I was going to port feedparser to Python 3. Two days ago, I wrote that I had one big question to answer: str or bytes?

Today I can say that str was the correct answer: feedparser passes all 4055 unit tests in Python 3.0 and 3.1! I've uploaded the git repository with my changes to GitHub and have posted a comment to ( Read more... )

I spent some time this weekend working on porting feedparser to Python 3, and found that it will be difficult because there are two separate parsers included (a strict parser and a loose parser), and while each works differently, both use the same core machinery in feedparser.

With the strict parser, things are going fairly well. The "wellformed" ( Read more... )

Today I'm announcing I'm throwing my hat in the ring to port feedparser to Python 3. There's a ticket open regarding this at the feedparser bug tracker, but the person who's working on porting it appears to be writing Python 3 code instead of writing Python 2 code that the 2to3 tool can then convert.

I'm going to take the opposite approach -- ( Read more... )

I've really been working hard to make sure that every piece of code that I commit to listparser is backed by unit tests to ensure that the code does what I expect it to do. But a while back I had the idea that it would be great to have some kind of program that could watch the unit tests run and produce a webpage showing me exactly what lines of ( Read more... )

I recently found a need to subclass the builtin type unicode and add some additional properties. To instantiate I wanted to pass in a big, ugly object and get a unicode object back. After trying fruitlessly to override __init__, I finally read up on the Python data model. Turns out I needed to override both __new__ and __init__.

Here's a quick ( Read more... )

A few days ago I added support for tracking Wordpress.com comments, but its implementation leaves a lot to be desired, as I'm merely using comment feeds for the purpose ( Read more... )