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Ask HN: the most amazing python script you ever wrote ?
As I learn python, i wonder what was the most funny/amazing python script you wrote during your work/education ? and how it helped.
Maybe I could also do them as an exercise to build up some python skills as i experiment more and more to learn it.
- omarish 18y agoI wrote a websnapr equivalent one time. I needed thumbnails of every website on the internet and favicons wouldn't do. So my script: 1. connected to a database and found a list of sites it needed images of 2. checked the image table to make sure there was a recent (< 1 day) snapshot 3. if there was not, it would start X, take a screenshot 4. use photologue to compress it on-the-fly 5. save the picture it was less than 200 lines, but it worked really well. that's still my pride and joy.
- ideamonk 18y agowow that sounds great :)
- thorax 18y agoI've written a lot, but none I'd characterize as funny or amazing. I've enjoyed most writing the wrapper classes for embedding Python in Counter-Strike: Source, but there's nothing amazing there. If you want to cut your teeth on some fun little challenges, you might try codegolf: http://codegolf.com/competition/browse http://codegolf.com/competition/browse
- ideamonk 18y agoyepp! how could i forget codegolf :)
- icey 18y agoA few months ago I wrote a python script that built relation data from a database using only primary key data (all the PKs were GUIDs) to build a mapping of the actual relations from the database. This particular application had grown quite large and no relationships were ever really documented. Then once the relationships were all mapped out, I wrote another Python script to shell out C# classes for all of the tables and their relations so that I had an easy way (data library + basic web forms) to explore the data. All said and done I think it was a shade under a thousand lines and saved me weeks of exploration and hand coding.
- pshc 18y agoHere's a terrible brainfuck interpreter: http://python.pastebin.com/f3d434dd2 http://python.pastebin.com/f3d434dd2 I wrote it as an exercise in functional style, and so it has no mutation (other than the tuple assignment in the main loop, which I couldn't devise a functional equivalent for). It is incredibly inefficient as a result. But it all fits in a single Python statement, save initialization!
- habnabit 18y agohttp://paste.pocoo.org/show/91848/ http://paste.pocoo.org/show/91848/
- paraschopra 18y agoI wrote a genetic programming system in python. http://paraschopra.com/sourcecode/GP/GP.zip http://paraschopra.com/sourcecode/GP/GP.zip
- gaius 18y agoI don't know about the most amazing, but I am constantly impressed by how much work you can get done in so little Python. Last script I wrote 1) parses its command line 2) tries a list of servers to find the logfile it needs 3) retrieves and parses that logfile 4) fits a trigonometric polynomial using Fourier series 5) draws the original data plus the curve fit on a graph and saves that on a web server. 90 lines of code.