Diff’ing my way to the scrapbook!
October 16th, 2006
Fetching a scrapbook page & parsing it everytime to get new messages seems kinda overkill… specially because of the following two reasons -
1) I’m interested in only the new message
2) Parsing HTML which is not controlled by you & which changes frequently can leave your application a bit shaky!
So this is what i figured out when I was SMS’ing a friend during a power cut…
I can diff the new copy of the scrapbook with an old cached copy & parse the diff for only the new message’s html (text/links/images etc).
This will give me 2 benefits…
1) I’m no more dependent on full page’s structure
2) Minimal HTML parsing 
BTW… a quick google search showed that my dear Python already has a diffing module up its sleeve - difflib & diffing can be done like this.
Neat… aint it?
Py rocks!
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Posted in A strong urge to blog..., Python | Comments (1)
October 20th, 2006 at 3:36 am
Mayank
Hindi translation is fine but what exactly these lines means to you, is more important & pertinent.
Dad