Question

I’m playing around with the robotparses library, and I’m trying out the example program from:

http://docs.python.org/library/robotparser.html

My code is currently-

import robotparser

def TestMain():

    #Check robots.txt

    rp = robotparser.RobotFileParser()
    rp.set_url("http://www.musi-cal.com/robots.txt")
    rp.read()
    rp.can_fetch("*", "http://www.musi-cal.com/cgi-bin/search?city=San+Francisco")

The problem I’m running into is that when I run the code it runs successfully, but doesn’t return anything, anyone have any idea why?

Thanks

Answer 1

The example you are refering to is for interactive use in the interpreter and not a standalone program. You can’t produce anything meaningful just by adding a def statement. For your function to return something there has to be an return statement. And to use a function you have to call it.

Here’s a python book that should explain how to construct functions and turn them into programs.