Gray's blog

Alright so it’s been a while since I posted anything and I wanted to put something out there, while I have been working a lot on many projects I couldn’t really speak of, I have a few quick things to update you on before I get on to the main content:

First thing, the staff of Opensock have acquired MMOCCForum, this is pretty exciting and we are going to help get that place in shape.
Second, Axcid.org has had a complete rewrite of it’s API, now including keyword search. http://tunebin.info/ does a great job showing this.

Alright now onto the main content of the post:

After hating python and it’s syntax for a few years, I got the push of actually LEARNING the language, including some of it’s many libraries and functions. Once you get used to it, the syntax isn’t too bad actually. It’s actually pretty easy, for example:

import system, string

""" Python block style comments """
# Python one line bash-style comments

# Rather then braces for syntax blocking, python uses whitespace

#Functions in python must be declared before use, unlike in javascript.

# The Syntax for this is def

# e.g.

def SayHello(text):
        # This is the body of the function
        print(text)

# Say Hello would be considered a 'function alias', and would be used like this:

SayHello("test")

# Some built in python functions
string = "123" # set a variable
integer = int(string) # Convert string to integer
string = str(integer) # Convert integer to string

# And block statements use : to start the block, e.g.

if (string = str(integer)):
        SayHello(str(integer))

        # Else if is elif
        
elif (string = int(string)):
        SayHello("Oh..")
        
        # Not gonna reach this

else:
        SayHello("Else reached, so none of them was correct")

Just for an example of python, Axcid’s new JSON api can be used like this:

# axcid
import sys, string, urllib
import simplejson as json

AXCID_URL="http://two.axcid.org/new/api/?method=search.keyword&format=json&allpages=1&q="

def GetResults(query):
        query = query.replace(" ", "%20")
        url = AXCID_URL+query
        f = urllib.urlopen(url)
        obj = json.load(f)

        return(obj["track"])

And the result from that:

results = GetResults("sublime")

if (results):
        for track in results:
                print(track["title"]+" - " + track["artist"]

Writing a IRC bot in python the other day was simple as well. And a python-spidermonkey binding exists so it would be possible to bind the syntax of JS to python, Python-Spidermoney

Anyways, that’s all for my update. Hope it was useful to someone.