Lab 4: Finished

This lab really was quite simple because doing all the previous labs gave me the necessary tools to do this one. I found two libraries for akismet. Use this one as the other always returns spam="true"; which drove me nuts.

GUID worked well.

Finished Lab3

The submit process was my greatest difficulty for this lab. I was clueless on how Python gets post variables and a bit confused on the submit script. After talking with Sam, I was able to complete it and was surprised how easy these were.

to get post variables (var1, var2, ...):

def index(req, var1="", var2="", . . . ):

Submitting was a bit more tricky, but I just had to use urlencode(data{}) from the urllib to encode the data dictionary of variables. Then use urllib.urlopen(url, urlencoded(data{})).
docs.python.org has a good example. What confused me was trying to use the http library that someone recommended for doing posts in python.

Still Working on Lab3

Well, I'm getting there. I pretty much have the index and domain pages displaying properly now. The trick was finding out how to use XML in python. I tried Amara, but the installation failed. So, I decided to try ElementTree. I didn't have to install anything to use it. It was a bit tricky to understand how to use it at first, but it really isn't that bad.

Here's an example:

from elementtree import ElementTree
tree = ElementTree.XML('some xml string')

# find all nodes with tag
for node in tree.getiterator('domain'):
# get attribute ideacount's value
ideacount = node.get('ideacount')

# get text between the tags
domain = node.text

# find child node of foo where tag =
foo = node.find('submit')
tech = foo.get('technology') #get technology attribute

Now I just have to work on the submit process.