Need help running external program

[Leif B. Kristensen]

I'm using wget from Python to get extactly one line from a reports page.
I made this function that works for me:

def wgetline(exp):  # see Python Cookbook p. 228
    print "Getting result from server ..."
    command = 'wget -q -O - \
        http://www.foobar.com/report.pl\?UserID=xxx\&UserPW=xxx \
        | grep ' + exp
    child = os.popen(command)
    data = child.read()
    return data

I had to escape the ? and & in the url, or the CGI script at the other
end would refuse to cooperate with "Invalid UserID or UserPW".
-- 
Leif Biberg Kristensen