[Python] URL Un-shorten-er

Hi all,

I was playing with the BeautifulSoup library of Python. It is a very good library to parse and extract data out of HTML documents, even the ones that are poorly coded. So, while I was playing, I thought why not make something interesting. I looked around for inspiration and while browsing my Twitter feed, I came across many shortened URLs, why not demystify them? That's why, I wrote a small script to Un-shorten those URLs. I used a website, URLXray, to resolve the URLs. This is very naive script, I know. But still, that helped me in learning BeautifulSoup.

I'm a naive in Python, therefore, script may look a bit long.

Here's the code:

1. #!/usr/bin/env python
3. # Simple script to un-shorten the shortened URLs using the website - URLXray.com
4. # Author: Rahul Binjve (@RahulBinjve)
5. # Usage: ./urlDecode.py URL
8. import urllib2
9. from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
10. import sys
12. def main():
13.     if len(sys.argv) < 2:
14.         print "\nUsage: urlDecoder.py \"URL You Want to decode\""
15.         sys.exit(1)
16.    
17.     result = decode(sys.argv[1])
18.     print "\nDecoded URL is -> ", result
21. #Decode function, all our work will be done here.
22. def decode(userArg):
23.    
24.     url = "http://urlxray.com/display.php?url=" + userArg
25.     print "\nUser provided URL -> ", userArg
26.    
27.     webPage = urllib2.urlopen(url)
28.     tastySoup = BeautifulSoup(webPage)
30.     div = str(tastySoup.find_all("div", class_ = "resultURL2"))
32.     tastySoup = BeautifulSoup(div)
34.     for a in tastySoup.findAll('a'):
35.         if a.has_key('href'):
36.             decoded = a['href']
38.     if decoded:
39.         return decoded
42. #Standard Python Boilerplate
43. if __name__ == '__main__':
44.     main()

Thanks for reading.
Cheers.