Script gets the changes between two build versions of Houdini from the journal and outputs them in a more traditional changelog format. Be sensible with how much data you want to get! Requires the Beautiful soup and requests libraries

houchangelog.py

#!/usr/bin/env python2.7

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
from textwrap import TextWrapper
import requests
import collections
import sys
import re


def print_changelog(version, start, end):

    template_url = 'http://www.sidefx.com/index2.php?option=com_journal&Itemid=213&page=index&journal=default&logfile=ALL&perpage=9999&start=0&icon=ALL&search=&view=PRN&version={}&buildstart={}&buildend={}'
    url = template_url.format(version, start, end)

    content = requests.get(url)
    soup = BeautifulSoup(content.text)
    plain_text = ''.join(soup.findAll(text=True))

    release_notes = {}
    changes_it = iter(plain_text.split('\n'))
    for line in changes_it:
        # skip blank lines, comments, short descriptions and
        # then extract the version
        if (line and
            not re.match(r'^\sThe \S+', line) and
            not re.match(r' Ending boiler plate', line) and
            not re.match(r'\w+, \w+ \d{1,2}, \d{4}', line)
            ):
                m = re.match(r'Houdini (\d+\.\d+\.\d+):', line)
                if m:
                    change_version = m.group(1)
                    release_notes.setdefault(change_version, [])
                    release_notes[change_version].append(changes_it.next().strip())

    od = collections.OrderedDict(sorted(release_notes.items(), reverse=True))

    print 'Changelog between Houdini version {0}.{1} and {0}.{2}'.format(version, start, end)
    for k, v in od.iteritems():
        wrapper = TextWrapper(initial_indent="* ",
                              subsequent_indent='  ',
                              width=80)
        print
        print k
        print '----------'
        for line in v:
            print '\n'.join(wrapper.wrap(line))


if __name__ == '__main__':
    if len(sys.argv) < 3:
        print("changelog.py <version> <startbuild> <endbuild>\n"
              "\nExample:\n"
              "changelog 12.5 371 376\n")
        sys.exit(0)

    version = sys.argv[1]
    start_build = sys.argv[2]
    end_build = sys.argv[3]

    print_changelog(version, start_build, end_build)