Damian Cugley’s Weblog

I’ve been amusing myself by concocting an RSS reader using XSLT to do the processing. XSLT can even handle the downloading of the RSS files, but this does not allow for caching or aggregating—so I thought I would knock something together in Python.

Python is installed on Mac OS  X out of the box. But I discovered to my dismay that it has no XML parsers! Since I wanted to store my list of RSS feeds as XML, this was something of a bother. Not to worry—I visited the XML Topic Guide on the Python web site and downloaded pyxml 0.8.2. This then failed to install. I fixed this little problem by editing setup.py. In the imports I added get_config_var to the line

from distutils.sysconfig import get_config_vars

And I deleted distutils.sysconfig from the line

if sys.platform[:6] == "darwin" and \
distutils.sysconfig.get_config_var("LDSHARED").find("-flat_namespace") == -1:

This line would have worked if the import line had just said import distutils.sysconfig (and if other references to get_code_vars had been fully qualified names). I generally prefer to avoid the from ... import style of imports for just this sort of reason.

Now all I have to do is persuade the SAX2 parser to grok XML namespaces...

1 May 2003

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