Google Hacks, 2nd Edition

Program Google in Python

Programming the Google Web API with Python is simple and clean, as these scripts and interactive examples demonstrate.

Programming to the Google Web API from Python is a piece of cake, thanks to Mark Pilgrim’s PyGoogle wrapper module (http://pygoogle.sourceforge.net/)—now maintained by Brian Landers. PyGoogle abstracts away much of the underlying SOAP, XML, and request/response layers, leaving you free to spend your time with the data itself.

PyGoogle Installation

Download a copy of PyGoogle (http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=99616) and follow the installation instructions (http://pygoogle.sourceforge.net/dist/readme.txt). Assuming all goes to plan, this should be nothing more complex than:

% python setup.py install

Alternatively, if you want to give this a whirl without installing PyGoogle or don’t have permissions to install it globally on your system, simply put the included SOAP.py and google.py files into the same directory as the googly.py script itself.

The Code

Save this code to a text file called googly.py. Be sure to replace insert key here with your own Google API key.

#!/usr/bin/python # googly.py # A typical Google Web API Python script using Mark Pilgrim's # PyGoogle Google Web API wrapper # [http://diveintomark.org/projects/pygoogle/]. # Usage: python googly.py <query> import sys, string, codecs # Use the PyGoogle module. import google # Grab the query from the command line if sys.argv[1:]: query = sys.argv[1] else: sys.exit('Usage: ...