[Py] The Python Challenge -- Level 02

Here is a note of my solution to solve Level 02 of The Python Challenge.

The main library used is the urllib.request. In Python 2.x, it is just urllib.



When dealing with the challenge, I viewed the page source directly from Firefox and read the further hint: find rare characters in the mess below. With the hint, I copied the messy paragraph and tried to paste it in Vim for further text processing, but my Vim hung when I did the pasting. I had no idea about the hanging but didn't want to figure out the possible problem on the side of Vim. Instead, I decided to capture the messy paragraph within the code. It would be a better approach, I thought.

After getting the messy paragraph, I assumed that there were some readable letters embedded in the paragraph of big mess. Therefore I tried to pick out ascii characters from the messy paragraph. It worked. :-)

The original version of the my code (in Python 3) is as follows.

import urllib.request
import string

source = urllib.request.urlopen("http://www.pythonchallenge.com/pc/def/ocr.html") 

src_str = str(source.read()).replace('\\n','').split('<!--')
target_str = src_str[-1]

for c in target_str:
    if c in string.ascii_letters:
        print(c, end="")