[Chicago] Parsing Metra's Online Schedule

[Cosmin Stejerean]

> >
> > P.S. You need lxml to run the code.
> >
>
> If  there is any intention of running this on App Engine, you won't be able
> to do that.  One thing that people are a little disappointed about App
> Engine is your python libraries have to be pure python and can't have C
> extensions, so this might fail (unless you get lucky and lxml is installed
> on the linux distribution that they're using for the App Engine servers, but
> my guess is probably not).
>
> Fortunately this looks like it'd be easy to convert to use BeautifulSoup,
> which is pure Python.
>

Metra updates their schedule once a year, if that. We don't need to
have the code on App Engine parse the metra data live. We just need to
parse it and load it into the app. And keep the scripts around so we
can parse it again when it changes. Good point about the pure python
implementation though.

-- 
Cosmin Stejerean
http://blog.offbytwo.com