Question

I just wrote a script that is meant to go through the alphabet and find all unclaimed four-letter twitter names (really just for practice as I’m new to Python). I have written a couple previous scripts that use ‘urllib2’ to get website html from a url, but this time it doesn’t appear to be working. Here is my script:

import urllib2

src=''
url=''
print "finding four-letter @usernames on twitter..."
d_one=''
d_two=''
d_three=''
d_four=''
n_one=0
n_two=0
n_three=0
n_four=0
letters = ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f', 'g', 'h', 'i', 'j', 'k', 'l', 'm', 'n', 'o', 'p', 'q', 'r', 's', 't', 'u', 'v', 'w', 'x', 'y', 'z']

while (n_one > 26):
    while(n_two > 26):
        while (n_three > 26):
            while (n_four > 26):
                d_one=letters[n_one]
                d_two=letters[n_two]
                d_three=letters[n_three]
                d_four=letters[n_four]
                url = "twitter.com/" + d_one + d_two + d_three + d_four

                src=urllib2.urlopen(url)
                src=src.read()
                if (src.find('Sorry, that page doesn’t exist!') >= 0):
                    print "nope"
                    n_four+=1
                else:
                    print url
                    n_four+=1
            n_three+=1
            n_four=0
        n_two+=1
        n_three=0
        n_four=0
    n_one+=1    
    n_two=0
    n_three=0
    n_four=0

Running this code returned the following error:

SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character ‘\xe2’ in file name.py on line 29,
but no encoding declared; see http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0263.html
for details

and after visiting that link and doing some additional searching, I added the following line to the top of the document:

# coding: utf-8

Now, while it no longer returns an error, nothing appears to be happening. I added the line

print src

which should have printed the html of each url, but nothing happened when I ran it. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Well, you initialise n_one=0, and then do a loop while (n_one > 26). When Python first encounters it, it sees while (0 > 26) which is obviously false and it therefore skips the entire loop.

And as gnibbler’s answer tells you, there are cleaner ways of doing the loop anyway.