Examines a private Google Groups RSS feed to determine who has and has not posted during the week

TardyParty.py

import difflib
import re
import time
import urllib2
import xml.etree.cElementTree as ET

from datetime import datetime, timedelta

GOOGLE_TIME = '%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S UT'
XML_FETCHER_URL = 'http://localhost/GoogleGroups2Rss/index.php?group=oxidized-bismuth-blogger'

result = urllib2.urlopen(XML_FETCHER_URL).read()
time.sleep(1)
tree = ET.ElementTree(file='/tmp/text.xml')

people = ['Andrew Van Dam', 'Chris Maury', 'Evan Burchard', 'Benjamin Gleitzman', 'Jam Kotenko', 'Jason Kotenko', 'Kendall Webster', 'Nicole', 'Parker Higgins', 'Rich Jones', 'Zachary Adam Ozer']

now = datetime.now()
monday = now - timedelta(days=now.weekday())
last_monday = monday - timedelta(days=7)

people_who_wrote = {}

items = tree.getroot()[0][4:] # start of messages
name_re = re.compile("\((.*)\)") # match name inside parens
for item in items:
    item_pubdate = datetime.strptime(item[5].text.strip(), GOOGLE_TIME)
    if item_pubdate > last_monday and item_pubdate < monday:
        name = name_re.search(item[4].text.strip()).groups()[0]
        if name not in people_who_wrote:
            canonical_names = difflib.get_close_matches(name, people)
            if canonical_names:
                canonical_name = canonical_names[0]
                people.remove(canonical_name)

        info_dict = {'title': item[0].text.strip(),
                     'url': item[1].text.strip()}
        people_who_wrote.setdefault(name, []).append(info_dict)

print 'People who wrote are', ', '.join(people_who_wrote.keys())
print 'People who didn\'t write are', ', '.join(people)