del.icio.us importing

I wanted to change my del.icio.us username. You aren't allowed to do this directly, but you can export your links to an html file and try to import it back into a new account. Unfortunately their import function can't parse the data generated by their export function. Strange. (apparently fixed now) Luckely they have an open API (and a whole bunch of third-party tools).

So with the help of BeautifulSoup I simply parsed the exported html and used pydelicious to post it back into delicious. Like So:

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
import pydelicious
from itertools import count

def main():
  soup = BeautifulSoup(file("export.htm").read())
  user = "user"
  password = "pass"
  items = soup.findAll("a")
  print len(items)
  for item, n in zip(items, count()):
    href = item["href"]
    tags = item["tags"]
    title = item.string
    add_date = item["add_date"]
    last_modified = item["last_modified"]
    print n,
    try:
      pydelicious.add(user, password, href, title, tags=tags, dt=add_date, replace="yes")
    except Exception, e:
      print e

Ah, I love Python.

While writing this post I ran into some del.icio.us experiments, which might be useful to someone. And a follow-up with very pretty graphs.