MadMode

Basketball season is here. Time to copy my son's schedule to my PDA. The organization that runs the league has their schedules online. (yay!) in HTML. (yay!). But with events separated by all <br>s rather than enclosed in elements. (whimper). Even after running it thru tidy, it looks like:

<br />
<b>Event Date:</b> Wednesday, 11/15/2006<br>
<b>Start Time:</b> 8:15<br />
<b>End Time:</b> 9:30<br />
...
<br />
<b>Event Date:</b> Wednesday, 11/8/2006<br />
<b>Start Time:</b> 8:15<br />

So much for XSLT. Time for a nasty perl hack.

Or maybe not. Between my no more undocumented, untested code new year's resolution and the maturity of the python libraries, my usual doctest-driven development worked fine; I was able to generate JSON-shaped structures without hitting that oh screw it; I'll just use perl point; the gist of the code is:

def main(argv):
    dataf, tplf = argv[1], argv[2]
    tpl = kid.Template(file=tplf)
    tpl.events = eachEvent(file(dataf))

    for s in tpl.generate(output='xml', encoding='utf-8'):
        sys.stdout.write(s)

def eachEvent(lines):
    """turn an iterator over lines into an iterator over events
    """
    for l in lines:
        if 'Last Name' in l:
            surname = findName(l)
            e = mkobj("practice", "Practice w/%s" % surname)
        elif 'Event Date' in l:
            if 'dtstart' in e:
                yield e
                e = mkobj("practice", "Practice w/%s" % surname)
            e['date'] = findDate(l)
        elif 'Start Time' in l:
            e['dtstart'] = e['date'] + "T" + findTime(l)
        elif 'End Time' in l:
            e['dtend'] = e['date'] + "T" + findTime(l)

next = 0
def mkobj(pfx, summary):
    global next
    next += 1
    return {'id': "%s%d" % (pfx, next),
            'summary': summary,
            }

def findTime(s):
    """
    >>> findTime("<b>Start Time:</b> 8:15<br />")
    '20:15:00'
    >>> findTime("<b>End Time:</b> 9:30<br />")
    '21:30:00'
    """
    m = re.search(r"(\d+):(\d+)", s)
    hh, mm = int(m.group(1)), int(m.group(2))
    return "%02d:%02d:00" % (hh + 12, mm)

...

It uses my palmagent hackery: event-rdf.kid to produce RDF/XML which hipAgent.py can upload to my PDA. I also used the event.kid template to generate an hCalendar/XHTML version for archival purposes, though I didn't use that directly to feed my PDA.

The development took half an hour or so squeezed into this morning:

changeset:   5:7d455f25b0cc
user:        Dan Connolly http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
date:        Thu Nov 16 11:31:07 2006 -0600
summary:     id, seconds in time, etc.

changeset:   2:2b38765cec0f
user:        Dan Connolly http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
date:        Thu Nov 16 09:23:15 2006 -0600
summary:     finds date, dtstart, dtend, and location of each event

changeset:   1:e208314f21b2
user:        Dan Connolly http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
date:        Thu Nov 16 09:08:01 2006 -0600
summary:     finds dates of each event