[Tutor] My horrible looking program needs improvement.

[Kent Johnson]

On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 2:21 PM, Peter van der Does
<peter at avirtualhome.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 24 Nov 2008 11:00:59 -0500
> Peter van der Does <peter at avirtualhome.com> wrote:
>
>> I wrote my 1st Python program and it works as I want it to work but
>> ,IMHO, it looks horrible.

> OK, I put the code here:
>
> http://pdoes.pastebin.com/m47109194

I would work on breaking this up into functions. The main problem with
this is the need to access the logger. I would make that a module
(global) variable so it is accessible to each function without being
passed as a parameter. Then some possible functions are

- read and parse command line options, returning the options object.
(You might want to combine the command-line options and the Config
options into a single configuration object that can be passed as a
single parameter. A couple of ways to do that:
Set the command-line options into the Config object yourself
http://www.red-dove.com/python_config.html#integrating-with-command-line-options
http://cfgparse.sourceforge.net/

- read the banned IP list, returning spamip
- setup FTP, returning the ftp object
- fetch the access log
- fetch .htaccess
- parse the access log, returning ip_list
- process the .htaccess file

Kent