What’s new? There is a new release of feedcache available tonight, based on a patch from Thomas Perl. The update includes Unicode support for URLs, a “force” flag to always download data, and an “offline” mode flag to never download data. Thanks, Thomas!

The csv module is very useful for working with data exported from spreadsheets and databases into text files. There is no well-defined standard, so the csv module uses “dialects” to support parsing using different parameters. Along with a generic reader and writer, the module includes a dialect for working with Microsoft Excel. Read more at pymotw.com: csv

Jesse Noller is leading a campaign to have Python developers form a network via LinkedIn.com. He talks about it over on his blog, so check it out for the details. According to Doug Napoleone‘s comment on Jesse’s post, there is a more formal effort to set up a PyCon08 group and tie it in with the web site for the convention. I didn’t realize that LinkedIn supported groups other than “employers”.

I’m pleased to bring the Python Module of the Week series to the O’Reilly ONLamp site. The main feed and home page are not moving, and all posts will continue to be posted here. Updated: The announcement post is here.

Back when Python 1.5.4 was hot and new, I wrote a class to serve as a basis for the many command line programs I was working on for myself and my employer. This was long before the Option Parsing Wars that resulted in the addition of optparse to the standard library. If optparse had been around, I probably wouldn’t have written CommandLineApp, but since all I had to work with at the time was getopt, and it operated at such a low level, I hacked together a helper class.

What’s new? I am happy with the API for feedcache, so I bumped the release to 1.0 and beta status. The package includes tests and 2 separate examples (one with shelve and another using threads and shove).

The getopt module is the old-school command line option parser which supports the conventions established by the Unix function getopt(). It parses an argument sequence, such as sys.argv and returns a sequence of (option, argument) pairs and a sequence of non-option arguments. Read more at pymotw.com: getopt

Jonathan LaCour presented an overview of SQLAlchemy at last night’s PyATL meeting, and now I have ORM envy. It’s too bad I can’t afford the effort that would be involved in replacing the in-house ORM we use at work, but I’ll definitely consider using it for my own projects.

Back in mid-June I promised Jeremy Jones that I would clean up some of the code I use for CastSampler.com to cache RSS and Atom feeds so he could look at it for his podgrabber project. I finally found some time to work on it this weekend (not quite 2 months later, sorry Jeremy). The result is feedcache, which I have released in “alpha” status, for now. I don’t usually bother releasing my code in alpha state, because that usually means I’m not actually using it anywhere with enough regularity to ensure that it is robust.

The shelve module can be used as a simple persistent storage option for Python objects when a relational database is overkill. The shelf is accessed by keys, just as with a dictionary. The values are pickled and written to a database created and managed by anydbm. Read more at pymotw.com: shelve