[Tutor] Any Python interface to USPTO web site?

[Terry Carroll]

I have the need to run periodic searches on the US Patent and Trademark 
Office website, www.uspto.gov.  Before I reinvent the wheel, I thought I'd 
check to see if anyone knew of such a beast.

For instance, It's like to be able to pass an argument like one of these:

  an/"dis corporation"
  in/newmar-julie

to http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/search-adv.htm and get a list of all 
the patents owned by Dis Corporation, or invented by the 1960s Catwoman 
actress; or pass a patent number like 4,150,505 to 
http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/srchnum.htm to bring up a particular 
patent.

Then I want to be able to parse out the patent metadata, e.g. inventor 
names, dates filed and issued, etc.

Has this already been done?

The closest my google searches have turned up is 
http://hacks.oreilly.com/pub/h/1724 , but that turns out to be Perl rather 
than Python, and not quite dead-on anyway.