06 | February | 2017 | Simply Python

Imagine walking 10 mins to the train station, finds the train has broken down and the bus stop is 20 mins walk away in opposite direction from the station. This is extremely frustrating especially if you are living in a country with relatively frequent train delay and breakdown. The solution: create a simple alert system to your phone using Python, Pattern and Pushbullet.

The below script will scrape the MRT website for latest announcements using Python Pattern and send to the phone using Pushbullet. In this version of script, it will always return the latest post on the website. As such, the latest post might be a few days ago if there is no new breakdown.

We will assume that MRT is working well if it returns a non-current post. In such case, we will also pull the date and time of latest post for date comparison. The script is then scheduled to run every day at specific timing preferably before going out for work.

import os, sys, time, datetime
from pattern.web import URL, extension, download, DOM, plaintext
from pyPushBullet.pushbullet import PushBullet

#target website url
target_website = 'https://twitter.com/SMRT_Singapore'

# Require user-agent in the download field
html = download(target_website, unicode=True,
                user_agent='"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/27.0.1453.93 Safari/537.36"',
                cached=False)

#optional, for checking purpose
with open(r'c:\data\temp\ans.html','wb') as f:
    f.write(html.encode('utf8'))

dom = DOM(html)

#X-path for scraping target parameters
time_str =  dom('a[class="tweet-timestamp js-permalink js-nav js-tooltip"]')[0].attributes['title']
content_str =  plaintext(dom('p[class="TweetTextSize TweetTextSize--26px js-tweet-text tweet-text"]')[0].content)

full_str = time_str + '\n' + content_str

api_key_path = r'API key str filepath'
with open(api_key_path,'r') as f:
    apiKey = f.read()

p = PushBullet(apiKey)
p.pushNote('all', 'mrt alert', full_str ,recipient_type="random1")

Modification can be done such that it will only create alert if there is current news simply by comparing the date of the post to today’s date.