[SOLVED] Adapting conky "# of new emails" script to a message preview

Question

The Conky wiki has a section to display the number of new emails (Gmail) with a python script. It appears that script uses urllib for credentials and then xml.etree to navigate the xml.
I'm trying to adapt the script to display the sender and title, since they exist in the xml.
I've been reading the documentation and after looking at the xml I'm pretty sure I need to use indexing, can't get it to work though.
Here's the script from the wiki with my comments on what I'm trying to add in.
#! /usr/bin/env python
import urllib.request
from xml.etree import ElementTree as etree
# Enter your username and password below within quotes below, in place of ****.
# Set up authentication for gmail
auth_handler = urllib.request.HTTPBasicAuthHandler()
auth_handler.add_password(realm='New mail feed',
uri='https://mail.google.com/',
user= '****',
passwd= '****')
opener = urllib.request.build_opener(auth_handler)
# ...and install it globally so it can be used with urlopen.
urllib.request.install_opener(opener)
gmail = 'https://mail.google.com/gmail/feed/atom'
NS = '{http://purl.org/atom/ns#}'
with urllib.request.urlopen(gmail) as source:
tree = etree.parse(source)
fullcount = tree.find(NS + 'fullcount').text
# attempt to navigate to sender of email (feed/entry/author/name)
firstemailsender = tree[0][5][5][0].text
secondemailsender = tree[0][6][5][0].text
# attempt to navigate to title of email (feed/entry/title)
firstemailtitle = tree[0][5][0].text
firstemailtitle = tree[0][5][0].text
print(fullcount + ' new')
# added print that doesn't work because of other things not working
print (firstemailsender + ' - ' + firstemailtitle)
print (secondemailsender + ' - ' + secondemailtitle)
Last edited by heyitstallchris (2015-02-06 14:55:07)

Answer 1

Hey,
I've re-written the code to use XPath instead of indexing, IMO it's more robust and compact. findall() returns a list of all Elements that match the given XPath. Make sure to include the namespace before each element name in the path (you can see that below when I use findall() to get all "author/name" elements.
The code saves all new mails in an array (mails) full of dicts, each with a 'sender' and 'title' keys. The script will blow up if you have zero or one new emails, but you can trivially check the length of the mails array before printing at the end.
If you have any questions about the code just ask.
#! /usr/bin/env python
import urllib.request
from xml.etree import ElementTree as etree
# Enter your username and password below within quotes below, in place of ****.
# Set up authentication for gmail
auth_handler = urllib.request.HTTPBasicAuthHandler()
auth_handler.add_password(realm='New mail feed',
uri='https://mail.google.com/',
user= '*****',
passwd= '*****')
opener = urllib.request.build_opener(auth_handler)
# ...and install it globally so it can be used with urlopen.
urllib.request.install_opener(opener)
gmail = 'https://mail.google.com/gmail/feed/atom'
NS = '{http://purl.org/atom/ns#}'
with urllib.request.urlopen(gmail) as source:
tree = etree.parse(source)
root = tree.getroot()
mails = []
# only iterate over new mails, which have a tag "entry"
for entry in root.findall(NS+'entry'):
message = {}
# locate sender and title info using XPath (?) again
message['sender'] = entry.findall(NS+'author/'+NS+'name')[0].text
message['title'] = entry.findall(NS+'title')[0].text
mails.append(message)
print(str(len(mails)) + ' new')
print (mails[0]['sender'] + ' - ' + mails[0]['title'])
print (mails[1]['sender'] + ' - ' + mails[1]['title'])
Last edited by spupy (2015-01-28 14:00:56)