Coolest Python recipe of all time

[Raymond Hettinger]

On May 9, 2:31 am, Trent Nelson <tr... at snakebite.org> wrote:
> > 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])

That completely rocks!  Thanks for the recipe.


Raymond

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