Archive for the ‘python’ Category

Retrieving Rapidshare Files with Python

Friday, January 2nd, 2009

A cursory google search will reveal several scripts for retrieving rapidshare files using python, but each one I’ve seen delegates the actual retrieval to wget.

This is not necessary.

Rapidshare uses basic authentication to identify logged in members and urllib2 can handle this easily.

The following method would do the trick without the need to call external executables:

def rapidget(url. login, password):
    "Retrieve files from rapidshare using only python"
    request = urllib2.Request(url)
    base64string = base64.encodestring('%s:%s' % (login, password))[:-1]
    request.add_header("Authorization", "Basic %s" % base64string)
    i = url.rfind('/')
    filename = url[i+1:]
    print url, "->", filename
    file = open(filename, 'wb')
    handle = urllib2.urlopen(request)
    buffer = ''
    buffersize = 1024*1024
    while True:
        buffer = handle.read(buffersize)
        if not buffer:
            handle.close()
            file.close()
            break
        file.write(buffer)
        buffer = ''
        print '.',

This assumes, of course, that you have an account at rapidshare.

Posted in Internet, Programming, Uncategorized, howto, python | Comments Off

Deleting Messages from an IMAP Folder Using Python

Saturday, August 16th, 2008

I was asked to help delete 16,980 messages from an IMAP spam folder the other day. No email client could handle it without crashing. Even mutt choked after several hours of valiantly struggling.

Python to the rescue. Rather than write a script to do this I ran each command from the python shell. It’s a very addictive way of working because you get instant feedback.

import getpass, imaplib
M = imaplib.IMAP4_SSL("imap.gmail.com")
M.login("yourusername@gmail.com", getpass.getpass())

Now we’re in. Let’s see what directories exist.

M.list()

Pick the offending directory.

M.select("[Gmail]/Spam")

View the messages.

typ, data = M.search(None, 'ALL')
for num in data[0].split():
....typ, data = M.fetch(num, '(RFC822)')
....print 'Message %s\n%s\n' % (num, data[0][1])

Now delete them all and close the connection to the mailserver. To delete a message in IMAP, you need to set the delete flag on it then expunge the folder.

typ, data = M.search(None, 'ALL')
for num in data[0].split():
....M.store(num, '+FLAGS', '\\Deleted')
M.expunge()
M.close()
M.logout()

(To be fair to google I must point out that gmail was not the offending mailserver although I’ve used them in the sample code above.)

Posted in Internet, Programming, howto, python | 5 Comments »