Podcast catcher in Python

[Chuck]

On Sep 19, 7:40 am, Dave Angel <da... at ieee.org> wrote:
> Chuck wrote:
> > On Sep 12, 3:37 pm, Chuck <galois... at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >> On Sep 11, 9:54 pm, Chris Rebert <c... at rebertia.com> wrote:
>
> >>> On Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 7:43 PM, Chuck <galois... at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >>>> Does anyone know how I should read/download the mp3 file, and how I
> >>>> should write/save it so that I can play it on a media player such as
> >>>> Windoze media player?  Excuse my ignorance, but I am a complete noob
> >>>> at this.  I downloaded the mp3, and I got a ton of hex, I think, but
> >>>> it could've been unicode.
>
> >>> urllib.urlretrieve():http://docs.python.org/library/urllib.html#urllib.urlretrieve
>
> >>> Cheers,
> >>> Chris
>
> >> Thanks Chris!  I will play around with this.
>
> > I am using Python 3.1, but I can't figure out why I can't use
> > xml.dom.minidom.  Here is my code:
>
> > from xml.dom.minidom import parse, parseString
> > url =http://minnesota.publicradio.org/tools/podcasts/
> > grammar_grater.xml'  #just for test purposes
>
> > doc =arse(url)  #I have also tried parseString(url), not to mention
> > a million other methods from xml.Etree, xml.sax etc...  all to no
> > avail
>
> > What the heck am I doing wrong?  How can I get this xml file and use
> > the toprettyxml() method.  Or something, so I can parse it.  I don't
> > have any books and the documentation for Python kind of sucks.  I am a
> > complete noob to Python and internet programming.  (I'm sure that is
> > obvious :) )
>
> > Thanks!
>
> > Charlie
>
> Wrong?  You didn't specify your OS environment, you didn't show the
> error message (and traceback), you posted an apparently unrelated
> question in the same thread (there's no XML inside a mp3 file).
>
> xml.dom.minidom.parse() takes a filename or a 'file' object as its first
> argument.  You gave it a URL, so it complained.  You can fix that either
> by using urllib.urlopen() or by separately copying the data to a local
> file and using its filename here.
>
> In general, I'd recommend against testing new code live against the
> internet, since errors can occur from the vagaries of the internet as
> well as from bugs in your code.  Sometimes it's hard to tell the
> difference when the symptoms change each time you run.
>
> So I'd download the xml data that you want to test with to a local file,
> and test out your parsing logic against that copy.  In fact, first
> testing will probably be against a simplified version of that copy.
>
> How do you download the file?  Well, if you're using Firefox, you can
> browse to that page, and do View->Source.  Then copy/paste that text
> into a text editor, and save it locally.  Something similar probably
> works in other browsers, maybe even IE.
>
> Or you can use urlretrieve, as suggested earlier in this thread.  But
> I'd make that a separate script, so that you can separate the bugs in
> downloading from the bugs in parsing.  After everything mostly works,
> you can think about combining them.
>
> DaveA

Okay, that makes sense.  I will try that.  Essentially, what I am
trying to learn by just reading articles on the web is how to access
info on the web using Python, i.e. weather data, podcasts, etc...  I
have never done it before in any language.  So, I am trying to do
something that I've never done before with a language I barely know.
Can be very frustrating.  :(

Thanks for all the help!