Generate hostname named after famous physicists

physicist_hostname.py

#!/usr/bin/env python3
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

# Milán Unicsovics, u.milan at gmail dot com
# usage: physicist_hostname.py [-h] [-q]
# optional arguments:
#   -h, --help   show this help message and exit
#   -q, --quiet  suppress output verbosity
# generates a hostname

import requests
import random
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import argparse

def parse_args():
  parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
  parser.add_argument("-q", "--quiet", help="suppress output verbosity", action="store_true")
  return parser.parse_args()

def get_physicists():
  html = requests.get('https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_physicists').text
  parsed_html = BeautifulSoup(html, 'html.parser')
  links = [uls.find_all('a') for uls in parsed_html.body.find_all('ul')[1:26]]
  return [{'name': link.text, 'link': 'https://en.wikipedia.org' + link.get('href')} for _ in links for link in _]

def select_physicist(names):
  return random.choice(names)

def make_hostname(physicist):
  return physicist['name'].split()[-1].lower()

def main():
  args = parse_args()
  physicist = select_physicist(get_physicists())
  hostname = make_hostname(physicist)
  if args.quiet:
    print(hostname)
  else:
    print('{0} - ( {1}: {2} )'.format(hostname, physicist['name'], physicist['link']))

if __name__ == '__main__':
  main()

str.split() splits at whitespace by default and iterable[-1] gives you the last item, so if you only pass the name to make_hostname it can be rewritten as simply:

def make_hostname(name):
  return name.lower().split()[-1]

🎉

yeah, its more idiomatic this way :) almost forgot to write pythonic code