Python Programming On Win32

Fetching News Articles via NNTP

It should come as no surprise that a Python module nntplib supports the NNTP protocol. Following the style of the other Internet-related modules, a single class NNTP implements all functionality.

The NNTP protocol supports a wide variety of commands for determining which articles exist on the server computer. Information on these commands is beyond the scope of this book; you should refer to the NNTP protocol standard or the nntplib module itself for further information.

However, to whet your appetite, let’s create a sample program that scans a newsgroup for a list of articles with a specific word in their subject. It generates an HTML file, then fires your browser with the news articles hyperlinked:

# SimpleNewsViewer.py # Finds all news articles in a news group that have a specific word # in its subject. Then writes the results to a HTML file for # easy reading. # eg, running: # c:\> SimpleNewsViewer.py comp.lang.python python # # Will generate "comp.lang.python.html", and execute your # browser on this file. import sys, string import nntplib import win32api # to execute our browser. g_newsserver = 'news-server.c3.telstra-mm.net.au' def MakeNewsPage(groupname, subjectsearch, outfile ): print "Connecting..." nntp=nntplib.NNTP(g_newsserver) print "Fetching group information" # Most functions return the raw server response first. resp, numarts, first, last, name = nntp.group(groupname) # Get the subject line from these messages. print "Getting article ...