[EMAIL PROTECTED] 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 -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
