[Tutor] Finding libraries

Kent Johnson kent37 at tds.net
Mon Oct 3 12:20:24 CEST 2005


Oliver Maunder wrote:
> Hi all
> 
> I'm pretty new to Python - I've worked through Dive Into Python, but not 
> done a lot else. One thing I have realised is that pretty much whatever 
> you want to do in Python, someone else has already done it and stuck it 
> in a library. My question is, how do you find these libraries.

I usually google for 'python' plus some keywords describing the problem. Searching comp.lang.python also works. And feel free to ask here or on c.l.python.
 
> Here's an example - I want to write a program that downloads large files 
> from a website and stores them in a specified directory - preferably 
> with some kind of progress indicator. I'm pretty sure I can do this with 
> urllib, sgmllib (or just regular expressions to extract the links), 
> basic python file handling, and maybe some threading so I can download 
> more than one file at a time. Should be straightforward, but I don't 
> want to do it only to find there's a module with a 
> get_file_from_web(url, destination, progress_callback) function in it.

That is spelled urllib.urlretrieve(url, destination, progress_callback) :-)

Also Naja
http://www.keyphrene.com/products/naja/

Kent



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