The Free GeekThe Chronicles of Nerd-nia

Swaroop posted a nifty Perl script to check GMail. The script basically parses an Atom feed of the latest 20 mails provided by Google. Since a Python hacker like Swaroop is dabbling in Perl, I thought it was my duty as a Python evangelist (or is it Pythangelist?) to show the people that the same thing can be achieved using Python with equal ease The main code is around 50% of the total code. A large portion of the code is used for the pretty printing. Here it is —

## check-gmail.py -- A command line util to check GMail -*- Python -*-

# ======================================================================
# Copyright (C) 2006 Baishampayan Ghose <b.ghose@ubuntu.com>
# Time-stamp: Mon Jul 31, 2006 20:45+0530
# This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
# it under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 as
# published by the Free Software Foundation.
# ======================================================================

import urllib             # For BasicHTTPAuthentication
import feedparser         # For parsing the feed
from textwrap import wrap # For pretty printing assistance

_URL = "https://mail.google.com/gmail/feed/atom"

def auth():
    '''The method to do HTTPBasicAuthentication'''
    opener = urllib.FancyURLopener()
    f = opener.open(_URL)
    feed = f.read()
    return feed

def fill(text, width):
    '''A custom method to assist in pretty printing'''
    if len(text) < width:
        return text + ' '*(width-len(text))
    else:
        return text

def readmail(feed):
    '''Parse the Atom feed and print a summary'''
    atom = feedparser.parse(feed)
    print ""
    print atom.feed.title
    print "You have %s new mails" % len(atom.entries)
    # Mostly pretty printing magic
    print "+"+("-"*84)+"+"
    print "| Sl.|"+" Subject"+' '*48+"|"+" Author"+' '*15+"|"
    print "+"+("-"*84)+"+"
    for i in xrange(len(atom.entries)):
        print "| %s| %s| %s|" % (
            fill(str(i), 3),
            fill(wrap(atom.entries[i].title, 50)[0]+"[...]", 55),
            fill(wrap(atom.entries[i].author, 15)[0]+"[...]", 21))
    print "+"+("-"*84)+"+"

if __name__ == "__main__":
    f = auth()  # Do auth and then get the feed
    readmail(f) # Let the feed be chewed by feedparser

And here is a sample output —

ghoseb@trinka:~$ python check-gmail.py
Enter username for New mail feed at mail.google.com: foo.bar
Enter password for foo.bar in New mail feed at mail.google.com:

Gmail - Inbox for foo.bar@gmail.com
You have 20 new mails
+------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Sl.| Subject                                                | Author               |
+------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| 0  | Strip Whitespace Middleware[...]                       | Will McCutchen ([...]|
| 1  | [FOSS Nepal] list of free alternatives to windows[...] | Manish Regmi (r[...] |
| 2  | json serialization[...]                                | Gábor Farkas (g[...] |
| 3  | editable=False and "Could not find Formfield or[...]   | Corey (coordt@e[...] |
| 4  | IronPython 1.0 release candidate[...]                  | Jeremy Dunck (j[...] |
| 5  | django server tree organization[...]                   | Kenneth[...]         |
| 6  | Project when using multiple sites[...]                 | Jay Parlar (par[...] |
| 7  | [FOSS Nepal] Neprog (nepali version pogrammer for[...] | ujwal (ujwal2@g[...] |
| 8  | Bug#379789: wrong keymap on Intel MacBook Pro[...]     | Frans Pop (elen[...] |
| 9  | debconf is Level 1?[...]                               | Clytie Siddall ([...]|
| 10 | Weird slowdown with dev server behind nat[...]         | Akatemik (tpiev[...] |
| 11 | Database API question: I am not able to return a[...]  | DavidA (david.a[...] |
| 12 | Bug#379120: lspci present on i386, verify on[...]      | Eddy Petrişor ([...] |
| 13 | New levels of D-I[...]                                 | Eddy Petrişor ([...] |
| 14 | Installed Apps in settings.py[...]                     | limodou (limodo[...] |
| 15 | where u at man ... where can i call you ??????[...]    | Sanjeev[...]         |
| 16 | unable to runser ?[...]                                | Geert[...]           |
| 17 | Bug#380585: debian 3.1 install FD[...]                 | as_hojoe (as_ho[...] |
| 18 | Re: Translated packages descriptions progress[...]     | Michael Bramer ([...]|
| 19 | Loading an url takes 60 sec.[...]                      | and_ltsk (andre[...] |
+------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
ghoseb@trinka:~$

Well, the code is obviously pretty rough. It’s just for showing newbies how to use feedparser and urllib, two very powerful Python libraries. Improvements, patches are welcome

The text source can also be downloaded.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 31st, 2006 at 9:05 pm and is filed under Google, Programming, Python. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.