Vanity Search on Rosetta Code

A vanity search is usually when you look for your own name on Google to
show how popular you are (in those terms, no personal slight intended).



I wanted to know how many new pages on Rosetta Code that I had started
so wrote the following script that starts from a users first page of href="http://www.rosettacode.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Paddy3118">contributions,
and downloads all further pages searching for new page creations, which
are specially marked in the HTML and show as style="font-weight: bold;">N in the table.

The code:

'''
Rosetta Code Vanity search:
 color="#ff00ff">    How many new pages has someone created?
'''

 color="#a020f0">import urllib, re

user = ' color="#ff00ff">Paddy3118'

site = ' color="#ff00ff">http://www.rosettacode.org'
nextpage = site + ' color="#ff00ff">/wiki/Special:Contributions/' + user
nextpage_re = re.compile(
    r' color="#ff00ff"><a href="([^"]+)" title="[^"]+" rel="next">older ')

newpages = []
pagecount = 0
 color="#804040">while nextpage:
    page = urllib.urlopen(nextpage)
    pagecount +=1
    nextpage = ''
     color="#804040">for line  color="#804040">in page:
         color="#804040">if  color="#804040">not nextpage:
             color="#0000ff"># Search for URL to next page of results for download
            nextpage_match = re.search(nextpage_re, line)
             color="#804040">if nextpage_match:
                nextpage = (site + nextpage_match.groups()[0]).replace(' color="#ff00ff">&amp;', ' color="#ff00ff">&')
                 color="#0000ff">#print nextpage
                npline=line
         color="#804040">if ' color="#ff00ff"><span class="newpage">'  color="#804040">in line:
             color="#0000ff"># extract N page name from title
            newpages.append(line.partition(' color="#ff00ff"> title="')[2].partition(' color="#ff00ff">"')[0])
    page.close()

nontalk = [p  color="#804040">for p  color="#804040">in newpages  color="#804040">if  color="#804040">not p.startswith(' color="#ff00ff">Talk:')]

 color="#804040">print " color="#ff00ff">User: %s has created %i new pages of which %i were not Talk: pages, from approx %i edits" % (
    user, len(newpages), len(nontalk), pagecount*50 )
 color="#804040">print " color="#ff00ff">New pages created, in order, are: color="#6a5acd">\n ",
 color="#804040">print " color="#6a5acd">\n  ".join(nontalk[::-1])

What I have created on RC

The output of the program shows all the pages I created , in order of
creation:

User: Paddy3118 has created 31 new pages of which 20 were not Talk: pages, from approx 300 edits
New pages created, in order, are:
   href="http://paddy3118.blogspot.com/2008/08/spiral.html">Spiral
   href="http://paddy3118.blogspot.com/2008/08/monty-hall-problem-simulations.html">Monty Hall simulation
  Web Scraping
  Sequence of Non-squares
  Anagrams
  User talk:Lupus
   href="http://paddy3118.blogspot.com/2008/10/max-licenses-in-use.html">Max Licenses In Use
  One dimensional cellular automata
  Conway's Game of Life
  Village Pump:Home/Foldable output
  Data Munging
  Data Munging 2
  Column Aligner
  Probabilistic Choice
   href="http://paddy3118.blogspot.com/2008/12/knapsack-problem.html">Knapsack Problem
  Yuletide Holiday
  Common number base conversions
  Octal
  Integer literals
  Command Line Interpreter

I have added links to show when I blogged about a task as well as
starting the RC page. I can see that I have a 'User talk:' page that
should also be filtered out.



I was always writing small examples that I thought might be useful
examples for a Python training course. I was looking for a public home
for them and initially thought that, after stumbling across RC, that RC
would be a good home for them. I am only partially right, but I have
found the discipline of writing for RC to be enjoyable in itself, so
continue to contribute.



I quite enjoyed the challenge of creating an RC task beginning with the
letters K and then Y, so they could complete their full alphabet of
 named tasks. Yuletide Holiday was created around xmas 2008
and is really about Y2k errors - but they seem to have stuck with my
name :-)

I need to re-visit Data Munging and add extra clarification to the task
as RC needs a good task description, wheras a lot of data munging tasks
don't. 



If you are interested in language comparison sites then you might want
to take a look at RC too!



- Paddy.