[Tutor] Data Gathering

[John Fouhy]

On 20/08/07, Johnny Jelinek IV <johnnyjiv at gmail.com> wrote:
> I was wondering if something like this is possible; Can I create a python
> script that will connect to a website to use it's search features to gather
> information for me?  For example, if I wanted information about a movie from
> imdb, or something from wikipedia, but didn't want to go to the website,
> could I create a program to let me search and it would output data from
> those sites to me in my program?

You can.  To figure out how to do this, you will need to understand
the basics of HTML; in particular, form submission.  You'll then need
to look into python libraries like urllib.

(actually, with some sites, you could get by without form submission.
Eg, for Wikipedia, you would just need to fetch the url
'http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s' %
searchString)

-- 
John.