Notebook

Making a calendar from a Python release-schedule PEP¶

Python 3.6 has its release schedule posted in PEP 494.

I'm interested in having this information into my calendar. Rather than the sensible thing of manually adding a few events to my calendar, I'm going to build a calendar automatically in a notebook.

Why? Because notebooks are fun, and I've been using soupy to practice some functional programming.

I'm going to use soupy to extract the information, and icalendar to build the calendar data.

In [1]:

import requests
from soupy import Soupy, Q

Fetch the page:

In [2]:

url = 'https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0494/'
soup = Soupy(requests.get(url).text, 'html.parser')

The schedule is helpfully encapsulated in div#schedule:

In [3]:

print(soup.find(id='schedule').val())

<div class="section" id="schedule">
<h2>
<a class="toc-backref" href="#id6">
      3.6.0 schedule
     </a>
</h2>
<ul class="simple">
<li>
      3.6 development begins: 2015-05-24
     </li>
<li>
      3.6.0 alpha 1: 2016-05-17
     </li>
<li>
      3.6.0 alpha 2: 2016-06-13
     </li>
<li>
      3.6.0 alpha 3: 2016-07-11
     </li>
<li>
      3.6.0 alpha 4: 2016-08-15
     </li>
<li>
      3.6.0 beta 1: 2016-09-12 (was 09-07)
     </li>
</ul>
<p>
     (No new features beyond this point.)
    </p>
<ul class="simple">
<li>
      3.6.0 beta 2: 2016-10-03
     </li>
<li>
      3.6.0 beta 3: 2016-10-31
     </li>
<li>
      3.6.0 beta 4: 2016-11-21
     </li>
<li>
      3.6.0 candidate 1: 2016-12-05
     </li>
<li>
      3.6.0 candidate 2 (if needed): 2016-12-12
     </li>
<li>
      3.6.0 final: 2016-12-16
     </li>
</ul>
</div>

We can see that each entry is a pretty simple <li> tag, with a release and date separated by a colon.

We can use Soupy's functional style to quickly parse this information. We want to do:

find #schedule
for each li in #schedule:
- get the text before and after the ':'

In [4]:

raw_data = soup \
    .find(id='schedule') \
    .find_all('li') \
    .each(
        Q.text.strip().split(':')
    )
raw_data.val()

Out[4]:

[['3.6 development begins', ' 2015-05-24'],
 ['3.6.0 alpha 1', ' 2016-05-17'],
 ['3.6.0 alpha 2', ' 2016-06-13'],
 ['3.6.0 alpha 3', ' 2016-07-11'],
 ['3.6.0 alpha 4', ' 2016-08-15'],
 ['3.6.0 beta 1', ' 2016-09-12 (was 09-07)'],
 ['3.6.0 beta 2', ' 2016-10-03'],
 ['3.6.0 beta 3', ' 2016-10-31'],
 ['3.6.0 beta 4', ' 2016-11-21'],
 ['3.6.0 candidate 1', ' 2016-12-05'],
 ['3.6.0 candidate 2 (if needed)', ' 2016-12-12'],
 ['3.6.0 final', ' 2016-12-16']]

Let's parse those dates before we get ahead of ourselves:

In [5]:

import datetime
import re

date_pat = re.compile(r'\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2}')

def parse_date(title_date):
    title, date_string = title_date
    date_part = date_pat.search(date_string).group()
    date = datetime.datetime.strptime(date_part, '%Y-%m-%d').date()
    return (title, date)
    
    
data = raw_data.each(Q.map(parse_date))
data.val()

Out[5]:

[('3.6 development begins', datetime.date(2015, 5, 24)),
 ('3.6.0 alpha 1', datetime.date(2016, 5, 17)),
 ('3.6.0 alpha 2', datetime.date(2016, 6, 13)),
 ('3.6.0 alpha 3', datetime.date(2016, 7, 11)),
 ('3.6.0 alpha 4', datetime.date(2016, 8, 15)),
 ('3.6.0 beta 1', datetime.date(2016, 9, 12)),
 ('3.6.0 beta 2', datetime.date(2016, 10, 3)),
 ('3.6.0 beta 3', datetime.date(2016, 10, 31)),
 ('3.6.0 beta 4', datetime.date(2016, 11, 21)),
 ('3.6.0 candidate 1', datetime.date(2016, 12, 5)),
 ('3.6.0 candidate 2 (if needed)', datetime.date(2016, 12, 12)),
 ('3.6.0 final', datetime.date(2016, 12, 16))]

Now that we have the data, we can build the calendar with icalendar.

We want each release to be an all-day event, and have a summary like "Python release 3.6.0 beta 1". For good behavior reasons, we will give each item a UID, so that importing the same event multiple times doesn't create duplicates.

In [6]:

import hashlib
import icalendar

cal = icalendar.Calendar()

def add_event(cal, title, date):
    evt = icalendar.Event()
    # add Python to the summary
    summary = 'Python ' + title
    evt.add('summary', 'Python ' + title)
    evt.add('dtstart', date)
    evt.add('dtend', date)
    # give it a UID for stability on repeated imports
    key = b'python-release-%s' % title.encode('utf8')
    evt.add('uid', hashlib.md5(key).hexdigest())
    cal.add_component(evt)

data.each(Q.map(lambda title_date: add_event(cal, *title_date)))
print(cal.to_ical().decode())

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:Python 3.6 development begins
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20150524
DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20150524
UID:67825e3ff3754a56e4f7d2c647ff0921
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:Python 3.6.0 alpha 1
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20160517
DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20160517
UID:56e8815e1b8f2ee4adcd64c097685d40
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:Python 3.6.0 alpha 2
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20160613
DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20160613
UID:1761e57b86af70d47184b8fb0bbab671
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:Python 3.6.0 alpha 3
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20160711
DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20160711
UID:183cbb8704be0e84ee59163a4b3345dc
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:Python 3.6.0 alpha 4
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20160815
DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20160815
UID:56ca94d86e853816206b2d4d199ebb03
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:Python 3.6.0 beta 1
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20160912
DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20160912
UID:81dd90786b6a3d4604b12e3edf5ca95a
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:Python 3.6.0 beta 2
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20161003
DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20161003
UID:1393eb7d31ed6cf473d8f11d77d16035
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:Python 3.6.0 beta 3
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20161031
DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20161031
UID:be9bf8af73fa4e958da3499936565e64
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:Python 3.6.0 beta 4
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20161121
DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20161121
UID:ddc83f39cb269352bc088e11e633212f
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:Python 3.6.0 candidate 1
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20161205
DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20161205
UID:1c3e6cf5093809b0176529b9ea60bf99
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:Python 3.6.0 candidate 2 (if needed)
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20161212
DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20161212
UID:d285018665315ba07a0b1fad4ff89100
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:Python 3.6.0 final
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20161216
DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20161216
UID:8927cac2581ac4a054994fc00dea469c
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR

Now we can save this file to disk:

In [7]:

with open('python36.ics', 'wb') as f:
    f.write(cal.to_ical())

and import the resulting python36.ics into your calendar application of choice.

You can see the result of importing this file into Google Calendar:

In [8]:

%%html
<iframe src="https://calendar.google.com/calendar/embed?src=arcfq33k7n1docj2bpbda8jhg0%40group.calendar.google.com" style="border: 0" width="800" height="600" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>

This notebook is by Min RK and placed in the Public Domain (or Creative Commons CC0, if you prefer).