AltaVista: Translations

From: gherman at my-dejanews.com (Dinu C. Gherman) Date: Thu, 22 Apr 1999 11:52:33 GMT Subject: Project for newbie References: <70alf7.qc6.ln@loopback> Message-ID: <7fn2i0$7ql$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> Content-Length: 7024 X-UID: 114 In article <70alf7.qc6.ln at loopback>, morph at softhome.net wrote: > > I've read my way through the tutorial, and am now stuck - where do I go > from here? I want to learn how to use Python, but don't have any > pressing projects at the moment - can anyone suggest a program I should > have a go at writing, to help me learn the language further? What about this little problem, assuming you're interested in internet programming and keen to get familiar with the Python XML module...? ;-) Have fun, Dinu Context: The Altavista babelfish returns the following result page (see appendix below) after issuing this request: "translate 'water' from English to French" on that WWW page: http://babelfish.altavista.com Some quick testing reveales that you can do the same with just typing the following (wrapped) URL in your browser: http://babelfish.altavista.com/cgi-bin/translate? doit=done&urltext=water&lp=en_fr Exercise 1: Write a program babelfish.py calling the Altavista Babelfish over the WWW (using httplib, say) and parse its HTML output using your favorite HTML/XML parser (suggestion: use the XML module written by the Python XML-SIG) in order to extract the result and print it nicely in a terminal window like this: darwin> python babelfish.py water en_fr l'eau darwin> Exercise 2: Improve your program by allowing multiple words to be translated in a row, like this (you'll have to send multiple requests as Babelfish will try to treat your words as a sentence): darwin> python babelfish.py spam eggs en_fr spam oeufs darwin> Appendix: Sample Babelfish output (see context description) AltaVista: Translations

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En Fran?ais:
	l'eau
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