Absolute beginner - is this feasible?

[Bruno Desthuilliers]

lcazarre at gmail.com wrote:
> I am by no means a serious programmer (which will become evident as you
> read this very message), except that I use VBA almost daily to automate
> Excel spreadsheets.
> 
> I do enjoy programming however and the only thing that prevented me
> from learning a language other than VBA is the lack of a project. Until
> today, I was not sure what I would do if I knew how to program in a
> language such as Python.
> 
> I now feel the need to develop a small program for myself. I have a
> free subscription to Factiva (www.factiva.com), which gives me online
> access to virtually all newspapers, magazines, etc. using a normal
> internet browser.
> 
> The bad thing is that I can only access the articles one by one. I wish
> I could write a program that would:
> - prompt me to choose a publication (let's say The Economist),
> - find the latest publication,
> - download automatically all the articles in that edition and finally
> - combine and format the articles in a single Word document.
> 
> This way, I will be able to print the magazine and read it on my way to
> the office.
> 
> Now my questions:
> - is it legal? (I do have a subscription to Factiva. I do not intend to
> distribute the printouts)

For the legal part, you're on the wrong newsgroup.

> - If so, can I use Python to automate this task?

Should be mostly feasible. I can't tell for the conversion to Word (but
is this necessary ?), but I don't see major difficulty for the other
parts. FWIW, I'd start with the 2nd and 3rd points - and I'd eventually
try and find out if these documents are accessible thru RSS feeds first,
which would greatly simplifie the task.

NB : urllib (in the standard lib) and other 3rd part packages like
BeautifulSoup (html parser) or some rss reader may help.

> Thank you.

HTH