1

I am looking for a solution (application) that would allow me to make a request to particular web page every x seconds and retrieve the number (the number is the only content there, no html, no xml or anything else) and display this number in the taskbar.

Is there such application out there?

Thank you

Sylvain Pineau
  • 62,169
Maris
  • 263
  • what I don't understand: how is this number to be fetched? where is it stored / displayed? could you give an example? – Jacob Vlijm Oct 23 '14 at 10:22
  • @JacobVlijm the URL probably returns a plain text file without any markup, just the content. – muru Oct 23 '14 at 11:22

1 Answers1

2

The following python snippet should work for you:

#!/usr/bin/env python

import re
import sys
import urllib2

from gi.repository import Gtk, GLib
from gi.repository import AppIndicator3 as appindicator

class MyIndicator:

    def __init__(self):
    # Create Indicator with icon and label
        icon_image = "/usr/share/unity/icons/panel-shadow.png"
        self.ind = appindicator.Indicator.new(
            "MagicNumber",
            icon_image,
            appindicator.IndicatorCategory.APPLICATION_STATUS
        )
        self.ind.set_status(appindicator.IndicatorStatus.ACTIVE)
        self.menu_structure()

    # Menu structure
    def menu_structure(self):
        # GTK menu
        self.menu = Gtk.Menu()
        self.exit = Gtk.MenuItem("Exit")
        self.exit.connect("activate", self.quit)
        self.exit.show()
        self.menu.append(self.exit)
        self.ind.set_menu(self.menu)

        content = urllib2.urlopen('http://askubuntu.com/questions')
        questions = re.search('<div class="summarycount al">(.*?)</div>', content.read())
        self.ind.set_label(str(questions.group(1)), "")

        GLib.timeout_add_seconds(2,self.menu_structure) 

    def quit(self, widget):
        sys.exit(0)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    indicator = MyIndicator()
    Gtk.main()

Just replace the url, the 2 second delay and the re.search pattern for your needs.

re.search('(.*)', content.read()) should work if your file only contains the number.

The above code displays the total questions on Askubuntu in your taskbar:

Reference: https://unity.ubuntu.com/projects/appindicators/

Sylvain Pineau
  • 62,169