Prototyping/Download Sample Cut-up Share

(Longer term goal: create an Inkscape extension to directly import images from the openclipart site.)

Starting point: Connecting command-line to the creation of a custom Inkscape "effect".

• Command line programs & parsing "arguments"
• Manipulating XML with etree

Creating an Inkscape Effect with Python & ElementTree

Tools that will be useful: Python, lxml.etree, xpath

http://www.openclipart.org/docs/api

Get some feeds. NB wget's O option (and that's a CAPITAL O), allows to save to a reasonable filename of your choice.

wget http://www.openclipart.org/media/feed/rss/woman -O woman.xml
wget http://www.openclipart.org/media/feed/rss/man -O man.xml

Creating a simple HTML page from the feed

import codecs, sys, lxml.etree, urllib2

# Open Live URL
f = urllib2.urlopen("http://www.openclipart.org/media/feed/rss/woman")

# Open the filename given on the command line
# f = codecs.open(sys.argv[1], encoding="utf-8")

# Read in the XML file
doc = lxml.etree.parse(f)

# This is a Python dictionary containing
# the xml "namespaces" that we may use
NS = {
    'media': 'http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/',
    'dc': 'http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/',
    'cc': 'http://creativecommons.org/ns#',
    'atom': 'http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom',
}

# Loop over the item elements
for item in doc.xpath("//item"):
    # NB: the "." at the start of the xpaths
    # makes the query relative to the current (context)
    # ie the particular item (and not the whole document)

    svg = item.xpath(".//enclosure/@url")[0]
    thumbnail_url = item.xpath(".//media:thumbnail/@url", namespaces=NS)[0]
    creator = item.xpath(".//dc:creator/text()", namespaces=NS)[0]
    title = item.xpath(".//title/text()")[0]
    link = item.xpath(".//link/text()")[0]

    # Output some HTML
    print """<div>
<a href="{1}"><img src="{2}" />{0}</a>
</div>""".format(title, link, thumbnail_url)