Simon Willison’s Weblog

soupselect. My simple extension to BeautifulSoup that allows you to grab elements using CSS selectors; should be useful for parsing microformats. # 28th February 2007, 1:47 pm

Django snippets. James Bennett’s new site for Django snippets. The source code to the whole site is available. # 26th February 2007, 10:08 am

PyCon Day 1: OLPC Has Excited me. Did you know that the OLPC machines have a “show source” button? # 23rd February 2007, 11:21 pm

30 second PyPy tutorial. Zyroth on programming.reddit.com shows how to interactively compile a Python function to C using PyPy and benchmark it against the original. # 18th February 2007, 9:30 pm

Automated Translation of Java to Python. java2python can translate most Java code in to non-idiomatic Python, using ANTLR for the heavy lifting. # 15th February 2007, 3:50 pm

Say Hello to Elixir for SQLAlchemy. New ActiveRecord style layer over SQLAlchemy; a collaboration that includes the authors of ActiveMapper and TurboEntity. # 12th February 2007, 10:28 pm

soaplib (via) New open-source Python SOAP library, with a pleasantly Pythonic looking API. # 12th February 2007, 10:26 pm

boto. Python library for accessing Amazon’s S3, SQS and EC2 Web Services, with excellent documentation. # 11th February 2007, 12:17 am

Parallel Python. A simple mechanism for running Python code in parallel across multiple processes and/or machines, based on submitting jobs and retrieving their results. # 9th February 2007, 1:51 am

Mono 1.2.3 has been released (via) More importantly, it ships with IronPython in the form of Seo Sanghyeon’s Community Edition. # 9th February 2007, 12:55 am

TurboGears and Pylons (a technical comparison). Ian Bicking explores the differences between the two, and finds that the most significant is probably CherryPy v.s. Paste. # 7th February 2007, 1:51 pm

IronPython URLs. Mark Rees’ and Seo Sanghyeon’s collection of interesting URLs posted to the IronPython mailing list. # 4th February 2007, 5:25 pm

nose. Really nice Python unit testing tool—run ’nosetests somedir’ and it finds and executes every unittest (and test_like function) it can find in that directory tree. # 1st February 2007, 2:20 am

Spelling correction using the Python Natural Language Toolkit. Uses porter stemming to implement a search engine ’did you mean’ feature based on the Brown Corpus. # 31st January 2007, 10:07 pm

Pickles Begone. Barry Warsaw’s notes on adding SQLAlchemy persistence to Mailman. # 23rd January 2007, 1:43 pm

CSS library for Python (via) “A Python package to parse and build CSS Cascading Style Sheets. Partly implements the DOM Level 2 Style Stylesheets and CSS interfaces.” # 15th January 2007, 2:32 am

Apache Solr 1.1. Solr is the search Web Service built on top of Lucene. The latest release introduces JSON, Python and Ruby response formats in addition to XML. # 13th January 2007, 1:16 am

What Python looks like naked. Michal Wallace has been doing some really interesting work writing purely functional code in Python. His latest experiment replaces all of the basic Python statements with equivalent functions. # 10th January 2007, 11:22 pm

mimeparse.py (via) Parsing mime-types is harder than you might think. # 8th January 2007, 6:43 pm

supervisor2. I haven’t tried this yet, but looks like a decent process monitoring tool. It even has an XML-RPC interface. # 8th January 2007, 1:19 am

Why doesn’t Python have more data format readers in the stdlib? I for one would love to see simplejson included in the standard library, with or without a C implementation. # 8th January 2007, 1:03 am

Writing a Jokosher extension. I like the way API calls are made through an API object passed to the extension’s startup function. # 7th January 2007, 10:25 pm

killableprocess.py. “I have created a python module which can launch a subprocess, wait for the process with a timeout, and kill that process and all of its sub-subprocesses correctly, on Windows, Mac, and Linux.” # 23rd December 2006, 12:23 am

html5lib (via) A python library for working with HTML5 documents. # 22nd December 2006, 11:58 pm

The Daily Python-URL. Python’s number one news source, now powered by Django. # 22nd December 2006, 11:39 pm

__builtins__ usage. Avoid using __builtins__ if you want your code to be compatible with IronPython. # 18th December 2006, 3:22 pm

Meta-classes Made Easy. Fuzzyman introduces a metaclass factory for applying a decorator to every method of a class. # 17th December 2006, 12:42 am

SubWiki (via) A wiki that uses Subversion for its data repository, implemented as a Python CGI. # 16th December 2006, 7:19 pm

[Python-3000] Refactoring tool available. Guido’s initial work on a tool for converting Python 2.x code to Python 3K. # 15th December 2006, 2:19 pm