Question

I’m looking to start building web apps. I need basic CRUD functionality.

I understand the basics of how to do this in ruby and python – but here’s where I’m stuck:

How do I parse a GET or POST request in Ruby/Python?

I’m trying to interact with someone else’s API, I know the string I need, just not how to reference and use that string while coding.

Example:
I want to reference a users profile, and count the number of posts they’ve made.

I know the URL looks something like this:
http://www.coolwebsite.com/users?bobsgreat?postcount

That returns a value= to his posts.

How do I get this number into my Python script- and then how can I have python write this into an HTML file for viewing?

Sorry if I’m asking a lot here, the question grew as I started writing.

Answer 1

This is a very rough example of how you can do this in python. It would need modification for your specific situation, but hopefully it can get you started:

import urllib
import urllib2
url = "http://www.coolwebsite.com"
post = urllib.urlencode({"users":"bob", "bobsgreat":"yes", "postcount":"14"})

request = urllib2.Request(url, post)
socket = urllib2.urlopen(request)

hdrs = socket.headers
source = socket.read()
socket.close()

print "---- Headers -----"
print hdrs
print "---- Source HTML -----"
print source
print "---- END -----"

value = 0
for line in source.splitlines():
    if not line.strip():  continue
    if line.startswith("value="):
        try:
            value = line.split("=")
        except IndexError:
            pass
    if value > 0:
        break

open("some.html", "w").write("value is: %d" % value)