[caption id="" align=“alignleft” width=“160” caption=“Pumpkin Black
Bean Soup by neon.mamacita”][/caption]
Last night I attended two short presentation by Leonard Richardson, author of the O’Reilly book RESTful Web Services and developer on Launchpad.net. Unfortunately it took me a while to find a parking spot near UNC’s Chapman Hall, so I missed 90% of the first one, titled “A Spotter’s Guide to RESTful Web Services”. Based on the number of questions that were asked at the end, it seemed to me that this is an area where there are way too many possible ways people can get lost attempting to implement it…
The next presentation, “Six Years of BeautifulSoup" hit a bit closer for me, as I have been working on a side project that takes the exported XML-like file from WordPress blogs and splits it into smaller pieces to facilitate the import process. My main issue is that I’ve been using LXML and it seems that when you use it to parse XML files, it will convert some reserved HTML characters that are part of any HTML tag present in the XML nodes into HTML entities. In other words, any <, > and & in your HTML will be converted to <, >, etc.
Part of the presentation was spent with Leonard showing how Beautiful Soup is being used by different projects, specially spammers and notorious illegal arms dealers! Now, that is a claim that not all open source projects can claim! :)
[caption id=“attachment_988” align=“alignleft” width=“225”
caption=“Now, that is what I call a Beautiful Soup!"]
[/caption]
Interesting fact I did not know prior to last night’s presentation: Leonard is the creator and maintainer of Beautiful Soup. So after the second presentation was over and everyone had left, I was introduced to Leonard by Brad Crittenden as “another Crazy Brazilian” and had a chance to talk to him about my little problem. I was glad to learn that, even though Beautiful Soup will convert HTML reserved characters into HTML entities, you can easily turn this behavior off, something I just could not figure out how to do with LXML! Nothing like having a chance to chat with the creator of a project and hear him talking about his baby! :)
A big thanks to the folks from TriZPUG for putting yet another great presentation together! I can hardly wait for the next one!