Coolest Python recipe of all time

[Trent Nelson]

> What are your favorites?

I think I've posted this before, but I love my 3-lines-if-you-ignore-the-scaffolding language translator.  Not because it's clever code -- quite the opposite, the code is dead simple -- but because it encompasses one of the things I love about Python the most: it gets shit done.

    In [1]: from translate import *

    In [2]: translate('French', 'The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.')
    Le renard brun rapide a sauté par-dessus le chien paresseux.

    In [3]: translate('German', 'The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.')
    Der schnelle braune Fuchs sprang über den faulen Hund.

    In [4]: translate('Spanish', 'The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.')
    El zorro marrón rápido saltó sobre el perro perezoso.

translate.py:

    import sys
    from urllib import urlopen, urlencode
    from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup

    url = 'http://babelfish.altavista.com/tr'
    languages = {
        'French'    : 'en_fr',
        'German'    : 'en_de',
        'Italian'   : 'en_it',
        'Spanish'   : 'en_es',
        'Russian'   : 'en_ru',
        'Portuguese': 'en_pt',
        'Dutch'     : 'en_nl',
        'Japanese'  : 'en_ja',
    }

    def translate(lang, text):
        kwds = { 'trtext' : text, 'lp' : languages[lang]}
        soup = BeautifulSoup(urlopen(url, urlencode(kwds)))
        print soup.find('div', style='padding:10px;').string

    if __name__ == '__main__':
        translate(sys.argv[1], sys.argv[2])