Question

I am trying to write a simple news feed aggregator.

I am using http://code.google.com/p/feedparser/, and I get standard Python 9-tuple time format like (2004, 1, 1, 19, 48, 21, 3, 1, 0) for each post, http://packages.python.org/feedparser/date-parsing.html

How do I compare this time format?

If I want to know if an article in the feed is new or not, is comparing the time the only way?

Thanks a lot!

Answer 1

Comparing time is probably the best way, unless you want to keep every article you’ve ever seen around to filter the full feed against.

The actual comparison of the 9-tuples is quite easy: Python’s default tuple ordering compares elements item-wise:

>>> (2004, 1, 1, 19, 48, 21, 3, 1, 0) > (2004, 1, 1, 19, 48, 10, 3, 1, 0)
True
>>> (2004, 1, 1, 19, 48, 21, 3, 1, 0) > (2005, 1, 1, 19, 48, 21, 3, 1, 0)
False

Which turns out to be exactly what you need.