wikifortune.py

#! /usr/bin/env python
#
#  wikifortune.py
#  Get a random page (fortune-like) from Wikipedia.org
#  ksaver at identi.ca, Feb 2011.
#  Public Domain Code.
#
 
import sys
import urllib2
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup, NavigableString
 
lang = 'en'
url  = 'http://%s.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random' % lang
 
def getHtmlPage(url):
    useragent = 'Opera/11.01 (X11; FreeBSD 8.3-RELEASE i386; U; en)\
    Presto/2.6.62 Version/11.01'
    header = {'User-Agent': useragent}
    request = urllib2.Request(url, None, header)
    htmlpage = urllib2.urlopen(request)
    return (htmlpage.url, htmlpage.read())
 
def printText(tags):
    for tag in tags:
        if tag.__class__ == NavigableString:
            print tag.encode('Utf-8'),
        else:
            printText(tag)
def main():
    pageurl, htmlpage = getHtmlPage(url)
    soup = BeautifulSoup(htmlpage)
 
    paragraph = soup('p')[0]
    printText(paragraph)
    print '%s' % (pageurl)
 
if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()