7.17 The nntplib Module

The nntplib module provides a Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) client implementation.

7.17.1 Listing messages

Prior to reading messages from a news server, you have to connect to the server and then select a newsgroup. The script in Example 7-32 also downloads a complete list of all messages on the server and extracts some more or less interesting statistics from that list.

Example 7-32. Using the nntplib Module to List Messages

File: nntplib-example-1.py

import nntplib
import string

SERVER = "news.spam.egg"
GROUP  = "comp.lang.python" 
AUTHOR = "[email protected]" # eff-bots human alias

# connect to server
server = nntplib.NNTP(SERVER)

# choose a newsgroup
resp, count, first, last, name = server.group(GROUP)
print "count", "=>", count
print "range", "=>", first, last

# list all items on the server
resp, items = server.xover(first, last)

# extract some statistics
authors = {}
subjects = {}
for id, subject, author, date, message_id, references, size, lines in items:
    authors[author] = None
    if subject[:4] == "Re: ":
        subject = subject[4:]
    subjects[subject] = None
    if string.find(author, AUTHOR) >= 0:
        print id, subject
    
print "authors", "=>", len(authors)
print "subjects", "=>", len(subjects)

count => 607
range => 57179 57971
57474 Three decades of Python!
...
57477 More Python books coming...
authors => 257
subjects => 200

7.17.2 Downloading Messages

Downloading a message is easy. Just call the article method, as shown in Example 7-33.

Example 7-33. Using the nntplib Module to Download Messages

File: nntplib-example-2.py

import nntplib
import string

SERVER = "news.spam.egg"
GROUP  = "comp.lang.python" 
KEYWORD = "tkinter"

# connect to server
server = nntplib.NNTP(SERVER)

resp, count, first, last, name = server.group(GROUP)
resp, items = server.xover(first, last)
for id, subject, author, date, message_id, references, size, lines in items:
    if string.find(string.lower(subject), KEYWORD) >= 0:
        resp, id, message_id, text = server.article(id)
        print author
        print subject
        print len(text), "lines in article"

"Fredrik Lundh" <[email protected]>
Re: Programming Tkinter (In Python)
110 lines in article
...

Example 7-34 shows how you can further manipulate the messages by wrapping it up in a Message object (using the rfc822 module).

Example 7-34. Using the nntplib and rfc822 Modules to Process Messages

File: nntplib-example-3.py

import nntplib
import string, random
import StringIO, rfc822

SERVER = "news.spam.egg"
GROUP  = "comp.lang.python"

# connect to server
server = nntplib.NNTP(SERVER)

resp, count, first, last, name = server.group(GROUP)
for i in range(10):
    try:
        id = random.randint(int(first), int(last))
        resp, id, message_id, text = server.article(str(id))
    except (nntplib.error_temp, nntplib.error_perm):
        pass # no such message (maybe it was deleted?)
    else:
        break # found a message!
else:
    raise SystemExit

text = string.join(text, "\n")
file = StringIO.StringIO(text)

message = rfc822.Message(file)

for k, v in message.items():
    print k, "=", v

print message.fp.read()

mime-version = 1.0
content-type = text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
message-id = <[email protected]>
lines = 22
...
from = "Fredrik Lundh" <[email protected]>
nntp-posting-host = parrot.python.org
subject = ANN: (the eff-bot guide to) The Standard Python Library
...
</F>

Once you've gotten this far, you can use modules like htmllib, uu, and base64 to further process the messages.