Question

Jon Skeet has the following reputation tracker which is built by C#.

I am interested in building a similar app by Python such that at least the following modules are used

• beautiful soup
• defaultdict

We apparently need

• to parse the reputation from the site ‘https://stackoverflow.com/users/#user-id#‘ by Bautiful soup
• to store the data by defaultdict

How can you build a similar reputation system as Jon’s one by Python?

Answer 1

The screenscraping is easy, if I understand the SO HTML format correctly, e.g., to get my rep (as I’m user 95810):

import urllib
import BeautifulSoup
page = urllib.urlopen('http://stackoverflow.com/users/95810')
soup = BeautifulSoup.BeautifulSoup(page)
therep = str(soup.find(text='Reputation').parent.previous.previous).strip()
print int(therep.replace(',',''))

I’m not sure what you want to do with defaultdict here, though — what further processing do you desire to perform on this int, that would somehow require storing it in a defaultdict?