How to search this newsgroup by a python script.

[Tim Golden]

Chris Rebert wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 2:12 AM, Helmut
> Jarausch<jarausch at igpm.rwth-aachen.de> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I haven't found anything with Google's group search, so let me
>> ask it (again?).
>>
>> How can I search this newsgroup from within a Python script.
>> (Perhaps by searching Google Groups or Gmane by some Python code.)
> 
> 1. Generate URL of the form:
> http://search.gmane.org/?query=foo&group=gmane.comp.python.general
> where "foo" is the search terms, with proper URL escaping applied.
> 2. Fetch URL using urllib - http://docs.python.org/library/urllib.html
> 3. Parse resulting HTML page (e.g. using BeautifulSoup)
> 4. Extract desired information from search results using the parse tree.
> 5. ???
> 6. Profit!

Alternatively, you could do something with the mailing list archive:

  http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/

The .gz files are gzipped mbox format so can be dropped into, eg,
Thunderbird for offline browsing, or searched with the email
package from the stdlib.

TJG