Pythonista Trick: URL to Markdown

by Peter Bijkerk

http://www.macdrifter.com/uploads/2012/09/2012-09-13%2018.37.05_600px.png

Here’s a nice little tool I made in Pythonista for iOS (review). This script is using Brett Terpstra’s awesome heckyesmarkdown web service, which is extremely useful and underrated.

To use this script, I copy a URL to the iOS clipboard and jump into Pythonista. I trigger this script to get the web page in Markdown encoded text.

This URL: http://www.macdrifter.com/2012/09/nfc-is-a-crutch.html

is turned into plain text and put back on the clipboard. The results are displayed in a popup Pythonista browser window:

Here’s the script:

import clipboard
import urllib2
import webbrowser

clipString = clipboard.get()

marky = 'http://heckyesmarkdown.com/go/?u='

queryString = marky + clipString

reqMD = urllib2.Request(queryString)
openMD = urllib2.urlopen(reqMD)
content = (openMD.read().decode('utf-8'))
clipboard.set(content)

webbrowser.open(queryString)

The script started life with a mess of URL validations steps, but Brett’s service is so awesome that it just fails gracefully with bad URL’s. But I did try out the new Pythonista console.alert() method. I like it.

via Macdrifter http://www.macdrifter.com/2012/09/pythonista-trick-url-to-markdown.html

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