[KevinH]

Hi,

Here is a little snippet of code to give the general idea. I put this together quickly to give you some idea of how to go about this. I am sure a simpler/tighter version is possible but this works in my testing for both python and python3

from __future__ import unicode_literals, division, absolute_import, print_function

import sys
import os
from quickparser import QuickXHTMLParser

try:
    import urllib.request as url_request
except ImportError:
    import urllib2 as url_request


def check_for_updates(site_url, plugin_path):
    plugin_name = None
    version = None
    ps = QuickXHTMLParser()

    try:
        # get the most up to date release version info
        # looks for the name of the current Mobileread Attachment
        # You could easily add current version info anyplace on the site
        req = url_request.Request(site_url)
        response = url_request.urlopen(req)
        the_page = response.read()

        # you could replace all of the parsing with simple regular 
        # expressions here as well
        ps.setContent(the_page)
        get_plugin_name = False
        for (text, tagprefix, tname, ttype, tattr) in ps.parse_iter():
            if text is not None:
                if get_plugin_name:
                    plugin_name = text
                    break
            elif tname == "a" and "href" in tattr:
                href = tattr["href"]
                if href.startswith("attachment.php?"):
                    get_plugin_name = True;
    except:
        pass

    # now get the current version of the installed plugin
    try:
        ppath = os.path.join(plugin_path, "plugin.xml")
        get_version = False
        with open(ppath,'rb') as f:
            data = f.read()
            ps.setContent(data)
            for (text, tagprefix, tname, ttype, tattr) in ps.parse_iter():
                if text is not None:
                    if get_version:
                        version = text
                        break
                elif tname == "version"and ttype == "begin":
                    get_version = True
    except:
        pass
    return plugin_name, version


SITE_URL = "https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showpost.php?p=2973066&postcount=1"
PLUGIN_PATH = "/Users/kbhend/Desktop"
plugin_name, version = check_for_updates(SITE_URL, PLUGIN_PATH)
print(plugin_name, version)

The path to the plugin directory would have to be properly determined inside the plugin (not my hard coded path here) and if I had bothered to put the current version someplace on the MR website I would not have had to parse to find the attachment name.

Using regular expression would probably make the code shorter. As I said, I just threw this together to illustrate how things could be done in a way that works on both python 2.7 and python 3.4.

After I get more time I will clean this up and add a specific current version info to the first post on the ePub3-itizer MR site to make this even simpler.

KevinH