Twenty things to do with a python script

With a deferential bow to Seymour Papert & Cynthia Solomon's 1971 20 Things to do with a computer, here a selected listing of Python recipes that represent a range posible explorations that need not involve much more than 20 - 30 lines of code.

Code/links/images to be added

Make a turtle

import turtle
import random
 
def Poly(n,x):
    angle = 360/n
    for i in range(n):
        turtle.forward(x)
        turtle.left(angle)
 
def makeFlower(p):
    for i in range(12):
        Poly(9,p)
        turtle.left(30)
 
def makeTriple():
    turtle.speed(44)
    for i in range(3):
        i = (i+1)*5
        turtle.color(random.random(),random.random(),random.random())
        makeFlower(i)

xa = -255  
y = -244
numberColumns = 5
numberRows = 5
turtle.penup()
turtle.setpos(xa,y)
 
for i in range(numberRows):
    for c in range(numberColumns):
        c=(c+1)*100
        makeTriple()
        turtle.penup()
        turtle.sety(y+c)
        turtle.pendown()
    i=(i+1)*100
    turtle.penup()
    turtle.setpos(xa+i,y)
    turtle.pendown()

Source: Lidia Pereira, Turtle Graphics Exercises

Create an Inkscape plugin to draw turtle graphics

See Seymour

Generate tactical hybrid texts

Using nltk

Source: Femke Snelting, http://snelting.domainepublic.net/files/EmmaWoodhouse.odt

Programmatically Manipulate Typefaces

Using fontforge and robofab

Source: Eric Schrijver, http://i.liketightpants.net/and/programmatically-manipulating-typefaces

Spider texts and extract strategic search patterns

ective enforcement of intellectual property rights is critical to sustaining e
or the enforcement of intellectual property rights , taking into account diffe
procedures to enforce intellectual property rights do not themselves become ba
em of infringement of intellectual property rights , including infringement ta
ensive enforcement of intellectual property rights than is required by this Ag
etween enforcement of intellectual property rights and enforcement of law in g
lability and Scope of Intellectual property Rights 1 . This Agreement shall be
 , and maintenance of intellectual property rights . 2 . This Agreement does n
ures where a right in intellectual property is not protected under its laws an
rk for Enforcement of Intellectual property Rights ) are invoked ; ACTA / en 7
calendar days ; ( h ) intellectual property refers to all categories of intell
 to all categories of intellectual property that are the subject of Sections 1
rk for Enforcement of Intellectual property Rights ) are invoked ; ACTA / en 8
g to assert rights in intellectual property ; ( m ) territory , for the purpos
rk for Enforcement of Intellectual property Rights ), means the customs territ
 - Related Aspects of Intellectual property Rights , contained in Annex 1C to 
RK FOR ENFORCEMENT OF INTELLECTUAL property RIGHTS SECTION 1 GENERAL OBLIGATIO
ct of infringement of intellectual property rights covered by this Agreement ,
he enforcement of any intellectual property right as specified in this Section
ng the enforcement of intellectual property rights , its judicial authorities 
he infringement of an intellectual property right from entering into the chann
ng the enforcement of intellectual property rights , its judicial authorities 
s for infringement of intellectual property rights , a Party ' s judicial auth
 the right holder ' s intellectual property right in question and actually ass
horization to use the intellectual property right in question . ACTA / en 14 A

Source: Nicolas Malevé, http://vj13.constantvzw.org/live/deskcam/

Run a web server

python -m SimpleHTTPServer

Permute the spellings of search terms

Source: Linda Hilfling, the experiments were developed later into the Misspelling generator browser plugin & project

Create a detourned search engine

Source: Sebastian Schmieg & Silvio Lorusso

Create a Traceroute Map

Source: User:Roelroscama/trim1/protoyping

Scrape Albert Heijn Loyalty Cards

http://vimeo.com/50859298

Source: Birgit Bachler, http://www.birgitbachler.com/portfolio/?p=506

Create a custom joystick sound recorder

Uses: pygame

Source: Peter Westenberg, http://www.deschaarbeeksetaal.be/p/rugzak/

Slice & reorder an audio file by predominant frequency

http://kurenniemi.activearchives.org/spectrum/

Source: Nicolas Malevé and Michael Murtaugh

Create clouds of 3D objects in Blender

https://github.com/Blender-Brussels/bpy-bge-library/blob/master/scripts/bpy/duplicate_object.py

Source: Julien Deswaef, Brussels Blender Group []

Create a dotcom index using letter permuations

from itertools import product
chars = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234567890-"
for n in xrange(253):
    for comb in product(chars, repeat=n):
        i = ''.join(comb)
        print 'http://www.'+i+'.com'

Source: User:Roelroscama, Documentation

Filter a subtitle file to highlight the unique words of a spoken text (Disappearance)

http://activearchives.org/wiki/Disappearance

#! /usr/bin/env python
# Copyright 2010 the Active Archives contributors.
# See the file AUTHORS for more details.

# This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
# it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
# the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
# (at your option) any later version.
#
# This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
# but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
# GNU General Public License for more details.
#
# You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
# along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

import sys
import re
from optparse import OptionParser
from textwrap import dedent

# inits usage and arguments
usage = "usage: %prog in.srt > out.srt"
parser = OptionParser(usage=usage)
(options, args) = parser.parse_args()

# checks the arguments length
if len(args) != 1:
    parser.error("incorrect number of arguments")

# opens the subtitle file and reads its content
try:
    f = open(args[0], 'r')
except IOError:
    sys.exit(dedent("""\
        Error: I can't open your subtitle file.
        Are you sure it exists?\
    """))
else:
    subtitles = f.read()
    f.close()

pattern = re.compile(r'[a-zA-Z]+', re.UNICODE)  # creates a pattern to search words

used_words = []
new_text = ""
previous_end = 0

# replaces all the occurrences of the words but the first one
for match in pattern.finditer(subtitles):
    new_text += subtitles[previous_end:match.start()]
    word = match.group()
    if word.lower() in used_words:
        #new_text += "*{w}*".format(w=word)
        #new_text += "<del>{w}</del>".format(w=word)
        #new_text += "--{w}--".format(w=word)
        new_text += "{w}".format(w="".ljust(len(word), " "))
    else:
        new_text += word
        used_words.append(word.lower())
    previous_end = match.end()
new_text += subtitles[previous_end:len(subtitles)]
print(new_text)

Uses: SRT, mplayer

Source: Alexandre Leray and Stéphanie_Vilayphiou

Create generative fugues

Voice 01 (Octave 2) File:Fugue 01 20110608.ogg
Voice 02 (Octave 3) File:Fugue 04 20110530.ogg
Voice 03 (Octave 4) File:Fugue 01-octave4 20110608.ogg

Source: Natasa Siencnik User:Natasa_Siencnik/prototyping/markov

Use open clip art and a loop to make a book of patterns

Uses: SVG, Inkscape

 
print """<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" standalone="no"?>
<!DOCTYPE svg PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD SVG 20010904//EN"
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/REC-SVG-20010904/DTD/svg10.dtd">
<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"
     xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xml:space="preserve"
	 width="200px" height="50px"
	 viewBox="0 0 200 50"
	 zoomAndPan="disable" >"""

# vertical amount of elements
veramo = 20

# ydist increases the vertical distance
ydist = 10

for z in range(veramo):
    transf = "transform=\"translate({0},{1})\">".format(0,z*ydist)
    print "<g " + transf
    # horizontal amount of elements
    horamo = 20
    # ydist2 increases the vertical distance
    ydist2 = 10
    # xdist increases the horizontal distance
    xdist2 = 10
    for x in range(horamo):
        transf = "transform=\"translate({0},{1})\"".format(x*xdist,x*ydist2) 
        print "<rect " + transf + """ x="0" y="0" width="10" height="10" fill="black" />
    print "</g>"

print "</svg>"

Source: Silvio Lorusso, A man of many parts

Generating Outline Fonts with 5 Lines of Code

import fontforge
font = fontforge.open('douar.sfd')
for glyph in font:
    font[glyph].stroke('circular',  30, 'square', 'bevel', ('cleanup',))
font.generate('douar-new.ttf')

Uses: FontForge

Source: Ricardo Lafuente, http://blog.manufacturaindependente.org/2011/02/generating-outline-fonts-with-5-lines-of-code/

Create interactive vector graphics

http://www.stuartaxon.com/2013/03/20/natural-movement-in-python-part-3-particles/#more-331

Uses: Shoebot (http://shoebot.net/)

Source: Stuart Axon and Ricardo Lafuente

Generate an epub

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/tutorials/x-epubtut/

Other Modules to check out...

Manipulate images with PIL
use reportlab to generate a paginated PDF
use subprocess to run FFMPEG and scrape audio/video info using a regular expression
use html5lib to scrape HTML
use glob to process a folder full of files
use urllib2, urlparse and html5lib to spider HTML
use json to parse results from web APIs
use optparse to make a self-documenting command line utility
use random to work with some noise
use datetime to work easily with dates and intervals
use OSC to talk to control other (realtime) programs
use uuid to generate unique ids
use zipfile
use xml to read and extract data from an XML source