News You Can Bruise for 2004 March 29

Hey! Sumana sent me a 'shout-out' on this week's Namaste America Gold, the semi-interactive Bollywood fan show/source for imported news from India. Excitement! Obaid Kalwani, the shouter-out, pronounced her name wrong and mine correctly. Go figure.

Until this week, all the 'shout-outs' were to and from people in the East Bay. leading me to do high-larious impressions of Obaid Kalwani reciting shout-out locations: "A shout-out from Walnut Creek... here's one from Hayward... shout-out from Concord... this is a Fremont train. Doors are closing." This week they had shout-outs from Los Angeles and East Brunswick, putting the lie to our hypothesis that they recorded a different shout-out segment for each media market.

Can someone point me to an HTML parser that turns an HTML document into a nested data structure like what I sketched out below? I'm sick of having to jump through hoops to collect the text of a link. I know there's something similar for XML because I heard about it at EuroPython. Stop me before I write my own! Must work or be makable to work in Python 1.5.2. Offer not valid in "Mirror, Mirror" universe.

Sorry, no spectacular thing to show you today. I've got only one of the three things working that I wanted to have, and (sad to say) it's not the one that hits people in the gut and makes them think This Is Important, insofar as any of them do that.

This is an HTML document.

->

["This is an", [TAG name='a' attrs={href: 'http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/', title: "Brought to you by HTMLCorp"} child=[TAG name='b' child=["HTML"]], "document"], "."]

Update, much later: I wrote Beautiful Soup because I wasn't happy with any existing parser.

Godzilla is set to be retired (again) with a Kill All Monsters!-esque monster monster rally of a movie called "Godzilla: Final Wars". When will they learn? You can deprive the Godzilla franchise of oxygen, but that won't kill it.