Yahoo! Hacks

Program Yahoo! with Python

Use the existing Yahoo! library for Python to build applications quickly.

The Yahoo! Developer Network web site (http://developer.yahoo.net) provides a number of tools to help developers build applications with Yahoo! data. Their Yahoo! Search Web Services software development kit (SDK) includes a handy Python library called pYsearch that does most of the heavy lifting (making requests and parsing responses) for you. This means you have a simple set of commands to learn and interact with, rather than having to take the time to learn how Yahoo! request URLs should be formatted. In exchange for this ease of use, you’ll need to spend a few minutes installing the library.

Download the SDK (at http://developer.yahoo.net/download) and unzip its contents to install the pYsearch library. From a command prompt, change directories to the newly unzipped SDK files and then change into the /python/pYsearch directory. In this directory, you’ll find setup.py, which you’ll need Python 2.2.3 to run. If you can’t install a newer version, or if you’d rather not, there’s a quick way to make the library compatible with older versions of Python. Just add the following code to setup.py, toward the top of the script:

# add for Python versions that don't understand "classifiers"
import sys
if sys.version < '2.2.3':
	from distutils.dist import DistributionMetadata
	DistributionMetadata.classifiers = None
	DistributionMetadata.download_url = None

Once setup.py is ready to go for your ...