a handy python script to retrieve "This Week in History" from onthisday.com and save it to `hlights.txt`

requirements.txt

beautifulsoup4==4.9.1
certifi==2020.6.20
chardet==3.0.4
idna==2.10
requests==2.24.0
soupsieve==2.0.1
urllib3==1.25.10

twih.py

#!/usr/bin/env python

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests
import argparse

MONTHS = {
    1: "january",
    2: "february",
    3: "march",
    4: "april",
    5: "may",
    6: "june",
    7: "july",
    8: "august",
    9: "september",
    10: "october",
    11: "november",
    12: "december",
}


def fetch_week(START_DATE, MONTH):
    f = open("hlights.txt", "w")
    date = START_DATE

    for _ in range(7):
        # setting url for site
        MONTH_NAME = MONTHS[MONTH]
        url = "https://www.onthisday.com/events/" + str(MONTH_NAME) + "/" + str(date)

        # fetching data
        req = requests.get(url, allow_redirects=False).text.encode("ascii", "replace")

        # if given page doesn't exist, it redirects
        # so catch that, reset date and fetch data
        if not req:
            date = 1
            MONTH += 1
            if MONTH == 13:
                MONTH = 1
            MONTH_NAME = MONTHS[MONTH]
            url = (
                "https://www.onthisday.com/events/" + str(MONTH_NAME) + "/" + str(date)
            )
            req = requests.get(url, allow_redirects=False).text.encode(
                "ascii", "replace"
            )

        # forming soup object
        soup = BeautifulSoup(req, "html.parser")

        # going thru each p tag
        for hlite in soup.find_all("p"):
            if hlite.text != "Explore" and "OnThisDay.com" not in hlite.text:
                f.write(hlite.text + "\n")

        # for readability
        f.write("\n")
        # increment to next date
        date += 1

    # closing file
    f.close()


def main():
    # setting up argument parser
    ap = argparse.ArgumentParser(description="onthisday fetcher")
    ap.add_argument(
        "-d", "--date", help="the starting day in format DD.MM", required=True
    )
    args = ap.parse_args()

    # fixing month and start date
    MONTH = int(args.date[3:5])
    START_DATE = int(args.date[:2])

    # call function
    fetch_week(START_DATE, MONTH)


if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()