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I was going to Paris for the first time and I had been learning french, but my pronunciation was still terrible. I use a spaced repetition flashcard system [1]

I was going to Paris for the first time and I had been learning french, but my pronunciation was still terrible. I use a spaced repetition flashcard system [1] to learn new things and improve my recall, and I wanted to use it to learn some french pronunciation. About.com has a 2500-word french audio dictionary [2], so I spent a few hours building a scraper to pull down all the pages, parse out the words (their markup is crazy), download the mp3 files, and build an xml file so I could import it all into my SRS system. Not a terribly challenging problem, but it's always nice to be able to quickly hack up some code to solve something. 1. http://www.mnemosyne-proj.org/ http://www.mnemosyne-proj.org/ 2. http://french.about.com/od/vocabulary/a/audiodictionary.htm http://french.about.com/od/vocabulary/a/audiodictionary.htm

Ixiaus 16y ago
I use Mnemosyne quite a bit too. I also have enjoyed writing scrapers for data I wanted but wasn't being provided in a downloadable format - most commonly stuff on forums. I wrote a scraper that scraped the entire textfiles.org website for their texts (mostly for fun), I wrote a scraper that logged in as me into my favorite phpBB forum and scraped every post in every forum in every thread - the script would create a directory for the forum, a directory within that named by a number to denote which page it was on, a directory within that named after the thread, a directory within that named by a number to denote which page it was on, and a text file containing only the content div (to retain the formatting of the original post). I used Python and Mechanize for most of this - the phpbb forum scraper was the most fun and rewarding. I've also written page scrapers for websites that have things like "1324 of the best side boobs!" I didn't want to Save As for all of them! So I wrote a script that downloaded them for me (this one was easy though compared to the phpbb script).

Ixiaus 16y ago

I use Mnemosyne quite a bit too. I also have enjoyed writing scrapers for data I wanted but wasn't being provided in a downloadable format - most commonly stuff on forums. I wrote a scraper that scraped the entire textfiles.org website for their texts (mostly for fun), I wrote a scraper that logged in as me into my favorite phpBB forum and scraped every post in every forum in every thread - the script would create a directory for the forum, a directory within that named by a number to denote which page it was on, a directory within that named after the thread, a directory within that named by a number to denote which page it was on, and a text file containing only the content div (to retain the formatting of the original post). I used Python and Mechanize for most of this - the phpbb forum scraper was the most fun and rewarding. I've also written page scrapers for websites that have things like "1324 of the best side boobs!" I didn't want to Save As for all of them! So I wrote a script that downloaded them for me (this one was easy though compared to the phpbb script).