URL Parsing Utility?

[willg at bluesock.org (will)]

There are a couple of ways of solving the vertical whitespace problem.  
You're getting two carriage returns from:

  print ick

The first comes from the actual data which has a carriage return at the 
end.  The second comes from the print function which appends a carriage 
return to the text.

If you don't want either of them you could do:

  print ick[:-1],

or alternatively:

  sys.stdout.write(ick[:-1])


The first one might append a space at the end of ick[:-1]--I'm not 
entirely sure.

I use Perl for string munging where I would have once used sed and awk.  
And sometimes I use it for reporting as you do.  Perl one-liners are
really powerful and just make my day.  I also use Perl where I need to do 
setuid root kinds of things because to do that in Python you have to write 
a wrapper in C.


On Mon, 8 Apr 2002, John Chambers wrote:

> While we're doing a python lesson, I'd be interested in how to  solve
> a  problem  with  this  code that I've seen with a lot of python, and
> which doesn't seem to be covered too well in TFM. Maybe it's just too
> trivial.   The  problem  is  that,  when given the URL on stdin, this
> program produces two lines of output, not one.  The  second  line  is
> blank.  This is, of course, silly, but lack of information on exactly
> how to get such trivia correct can be a significant barier. I tend to
> continue  using  perl, because when the input needs to be fed to some
> other program that's picky about its input, I can control  the  white
> space  exactly in perl.  With python, I can get the data right, but I
> always seem to get silly extra white space like  this,  and  I  don't
> have  a  good  enough  handle on python's char handling to understand
> where it's coming from or how to Get it Right.
> 
> | #!/usr/bin/env python
> | import sys, urllib
> |
> | if len(sys.argv) > 1:
> |    ick = sys.argv[1]
> | else:
> |    ick = sys.stdin.readline()
> |
> | try:
> |    print urllib.unquote(ick)
> | except:
> |    print "could not be unquoted."
> 
> 
> jc at trillian.mit.edu, the John Chambers who long ago learned that anal
> retentiveness is a required characteristic of a good programmer.
> 
> (And I've long argued that the most significant technical advance  in
> perl5 was the chomp function.  ;-)


-- 
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except Will--you can only see him in real life.