Using PubDate in print_version of custom news source

[mobilereader72]

Hi,

I'm rather new to this, but is there an easy way to use the pubdate information for the print_version of a custom news source?

For example, the article link is at:

http://www.somewebsite.com/.../article_idnumber

But print version is at:

http://www.somewebsite.com/.../print/20090529/idnumber

The 20090529 is the pubdate identified in the article link above. Whereas the pubdate is listed in the xml source as

<pubDate>Fri, 29 May 2009 23:31 -0400</pubDate>

Calibre seems to be able to parse the pubdate fine using the BasicNewsRecipe. So is there some sort of global variable I can use to include the pubdate in my print_version url?

For example:

def print_version(self, url): 
   return 'http://www.somewebsite.com/../print/' + pubdate + '/' + url.rsplit('/article_')[1]

From what I've read in the documentation, I will need to parse the feeds again using the parse_feeds() function in order to extract the pubdate data. Is this correct? Does anyone have any examples on how do do this? I can't seem to find any recipes that use the parse_feeds() function.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

[kovidgoyal]

Rather than using pubdate (which may not always work) you can simply fetch the non print url in the print_version method, using the index_to_soup method, and extract the URL of the print version from that.

[mobilereader72]

Thanks, but the print version link that I'm trying to use is not included on the non print web page. I know it sounds odd, but the non-print web page has changed in that they use Java now to generate the printed version. I discovered an alternative method of creating a clean, text only version, but this alternative method uses the pubdate as part of the URL.

Rather than rewrite my entire recipe, I was wondering if there was a quick and easy way to just change my print version URL so that it includes the pubdate.

[kovidgoyal]

You'd basically have to re-implement parse_feeds in your recipe, you can just copy paste it from BasicNewsRecipe and change it a little to extract the pubdate from the feed

[kiklop74]

I would recommend you to use in this case method get_article_url instead of print_version. In get_article_url you have access to the xml and you can override all article entries with print version:

    def get_article_url(self, article):
        raw_url = article.get('link',  None)
        date_url = article.get('pubDate',  None)
        #Extract values from date_url
        #we assume you have the final version of date string in datestr variable
        datestr = "<processed valid value>"
        art_id = raw_url.rsplit('/article_')[1]
        nurl = raw_url.replace('http://www.somewebsite.com/','http://www.somewebsite.com/print/' + datestr + '/' + art_id)
        return nurl

With such code you do not need print_version at all

Examples of this you can see at various recipes like La prensa, NIN etc.