The goal of this project is to provide the ability to take information published by Moodle, in the form of an RSS feed, parse (process) that information, and post new information to a twitter feed.
We need several modules to be able to implement this service. The two most important ones are feedparser and twitter.
feedparser is a library to download an RSS feed parse it into recognizable parts. You just give it the URL for an RSS feed, and it gives you back the entries in the RSS feed in a way that your program can understand them.
twitter is a package that allows you to access information from Twitter, and even to post information to a user's Twitter timeline. To get more information about this package, you can use the command pydoc twitter.Twitter from a terminal window, after installing the package using pip (see documentation at the bottom of this notebook).
import feedparser
import twitter
import os.path
import time
feedURL = 'https://courses201601.hope.edu/rss/file.php/31015/2541d5f2272b1ce53855626a577dbff4/mod_forum/500/rss.xml'
Each of the individual posts to the news forum is contained within one of the components of the entries array
entries=feedparser.parse(feedURL)['entries']
First, we determine when the last time news message that we have seen, but looking for a file named log.txt. If that file doesn't exist, then we use the value None to indicate that we have never seen a message before.
logFilePath = 'log.txt'
lastUpdate = None
if os.path.exists(logFilePath):
with open(logFilePath) as logfile:
lastUpdate = time.strptime(logfile.readline().rstrip(), "%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S GMT")
print "Last update date is {0}".format(lastUpdate)
The information below is used to connect to Twitter; see the documentation at the bottom of this notebook for information about how to obtain them.
CONSUMER_KEY='72WIHUEbiwAadt8lLQ5K2MZYg'
CONSUMER_SECRET='iap0FBrsrgnz0cwAHnbz4bdQin0As8rYppzUZUYcymYSF1SPa3'
OAUTH_TOKEN='4643042121-6P9V4eV1zuVbaNihZVLBC4y0ql6WCGU5RQ6M8AE'
OAUTH_TOKEN_SECRET='UG0kqSyGJLNDduvh3p1wii6lOxwLCdZoM77hpqGMAj5K0'
Get an authorization token to communicate with Twitter, and then connect to twitter to get access to an object that allows us to interact with the Twitter API
auth = twitter.oauth.OAuth(OAUTH_TOKEN, OAUTH_TOKEN_SECRET, CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET)
twitter_api = twitter.Twitter(auth = auth)
Now for the "meat" of the program. Go through each of the entries from the RSS feed, determine if the post date is after the last time the program was run, and if so, post an update to the desired twitter account based on the contents of the feed text
tweetsPosted = 0
for entry in entries:
postDate = time.strptime(entry['published'], "%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S GMT")
if lastUpdate is None or postDate > lastUpdate:
subject = entry['title_detail']['value']
link = ' ' + entry['link']
postText = 'News:'
requiredLength = len(postText) + len(link)
availableLength = 140 - requiredLength
ellipsis = ' ... '
if len(subject) > availableLength:
postText += subject[0:availableLength-len(ellipsis)] + ellipsis
else:
postText += subject
postText += link
twitter_api.statuses.update(status = postText)
tweetsPosted = tweetsPosted + 1
print "A total of {0} tweets were posted".format(tweetsPosted)
Now when we are done we need to update the last updated value stored in the file logfilePath
with open(logFilePath, "w") as logfile:
logfile.write(entries[0]['published'])
pip install feedparser
pip install twitterGo to dev.twitter.com/apps and set up a an API key
Click Create Twitter Application
Crate OAUTH token by going to the Keys and Access Tokens tab, and then click the button labeled Create my access token.
To view the information available in one of the entries, printed out the contents in a cell, e.g entries[0] This gives a JSON value, unfortunately one that at least the validator at http://codebeautify.org/jsonviewer indicates is invalid. So visually inspecting it indicated that one of the values of interest was the subject, accessible as entries[0]['title_detail']['value']
This page gives some helpful information about how to get started posting to Facebook.
This gave me an App ID of 1678163185788313 and an App Secret of 4715733e0e8ae7aa37cf95c2c8b249f9.
I set up the Contact Email as [email protected]
In Step 3 of the tutorial posting, there are options for the type of token when selecting Get Access Token. The value to be used is Get user Access Token. After I tried to get the token, I was prompted to submit to login review; clicking OK through the process seemed to work.
I was given the following short-lived access token:
CAAX2R9CQZAZAkBADWf9HBUXE289jCH5oYmdSgH5mvJnPztqDNZCh6bX2czCVbU5VQyZCq58BCnIHoJb1wbLgTATYQWa90aqLJosu6mZB1sLcPnX5J8BtYZAJJUZBKQXj9tayvQZB0oeEMhdxbkfpD5jl3PwQZCfblT5NU3U1TG1oT6BgeKYULH8WpWseDtjHp60jkDDTsO4ZBtF5cgNN0D8hys
Following the exchange process I get a new, long-lived token:
CAAX2R9CQZAZAkBABs3ZBu97pODgYc3zMIKqXETw0Hcy6MdLXZA1L9y7u1KXySifoZBm3dBSJhXGskgbefkXTI78cqZCejkmvQCBVeBsc8z2UBXpIDJRoTe34BwmRgwTSsNM6RkSDdaaLFdbk73ZCWWzPNnTD3tLUpfMKao81ZAFjadYSKqF9RrZApIz4Wh0LuFRj1gv50WuHnagZDZD
Unfortunately, trying their test script gave the following error:
The user hasn't authorized the application to perform this action
Since Facebook permissions are notoriously annoying, I gave up at this point.
Moodle provides a REST-based API to allow you to get more information; would be nice to be able to post updates when assignments are posted, due dates are changed, etc. It doesn't look possible to do this right at the moment, but it's worth looking into in the future.
This post has information about web services. I tried logging in via Postman but got the following response:
{
"error": "Web services must be enabled in Advanced features.",
"stacktrace": null,
"debuginfo": null,
"reproductionlink": null
}