translate by scraping dict.cc

translate.py

# found at http://blog.dispatched.ch/2009/03/15/webscraping-with-python-and-beautifulsoup/

import urllib
import urllib2
import string
import sys
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup

user_agent = 'Mozilla/5 (Solaris 10) Gecko'
headers = { 'User-Agent' : user_agent }


if len(sys.argv) > 1:
    values = {'s' : sys.argv[1] }
else:
    values = {'s' : 'kaffeetasse' }

data = urllib.urlencode(values)
request = urllib2.Request("http://www.dict.cc/", data, headers)
response = urllib2.urlopen(request)

the_page = response.read()
pool = BeautifulSoup(the_page)

results = pool.findAll('td', attrs={'class' : 'td7nl'})
source = ''
translations = []
for result in results:
    word = ''
    for tmp in result.findAll(text=True):
        word = word + " " + unicode(tmp).encode("utf-8")
    if source == '':
        source = word
    else:
        translations.append((source, word))
for translation in translations:
    print "%s => %s" % (translation[0], translation[1])