When I check the comments on a post, I'm quite curious to see the latest comments but have to traverse through each branch structure. Is there an easier way to do this?
Python 2. It works in FF on linuxmint at least. Save to hnlatest.py and run it from the command line, giving the url of a comment thread. It opens a new tab in your browser, latest comments at the bottom. "Tested" by inspection. :)
It would have been cooler to make a bookmarklet in javascript, but I didn't want to learn javascript for this.
import re
import sys
import tempfile
import urllib2
import webbrowser
try:
url = sys.argv[1]
page = urllib2.urlopen(url)
except Exception as e:
print 'How to run: python hnlatest.py url'
sys.exit(2)
items = re.findall('<a href="item[^>]+>', page.read())
items = sorted(set([x.split('=')[2].split('"')[0] for x in items]))
items = ['https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=' + x for x in items]
with tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile(delete=False, suffix='.html') as tfile:
for i in items:
tfile.write('<a href="' + i + '">' + i + '</a>' + '<br/>\n')
webbrowser.open_new_tab('file://' + tfile.name)
It would have been cooler to make a bookmarklet in javascript, but I didn't want to learn javascript for this.