A mediocre-yet-functional way to turn a list of Marvel issues into an HTML document of links to Marvel Unlimited, decently formatted.
First, you probably need to install duckduckgo_search, credit to deedy5:
pip install -U duckduckgo_search
Then, create a text file of the issues you want links for, in this format, with series name, issue number, and year:
Dark Reign: New Nation #1 (2009)
Secret Warriors #1 (2009)
Secret Warriors #2 (2009)
Secret Warriors #3 (2009)
Secret Warriors #4 (2009)
Secret Warriors #5 (2009)
Secret Warriors #6 (2009)
Dark Reign: Fantastic Four #1 (2009)
Dark Reign: Fantastic Four #2 (2009)
Dark Reign: Fantastic Four #3 (2009)
Dark Reign: Fantastic Four #4 (2009)
Dark Reign: Fantastic Four #5 (2009)
Dark Reign: The Cabal #1 (2009)
Each of these lines ends up being its own duckduckgo search, with a site:marvel.com/comics/issue/ appended. The script checks the first 10 results for a URL that ends in the issue number you provide, and if it can't find one, it just uses the first result.
Just call from the command line, like so:
python3 reading_order.py --file_path=absolute/path/to/text/file.txt
Doing so will produce a .html file in the current directory. It will overwrite the file if one exists in the directory.
Note: it's pretty slow, about a second per issue, because I have a sleep(1) in there, so as to not get rate-limited by either duckduckgo or Marvel, both of which happened to me in development.
Here are all the arguments you can provide, along with their defaults and what they do:
| argument | required? | default value | summary |
|---|---|---|---|
--file_path |
yes | none | path to text file containing summary |
--doc_title |
no | Reading List | title of HTML document as rendered |
--file_name |
no | readinglist | name of html document created (don't include .html) |
--styling |
no | True | whether to apply basic HTML styling to the document |
Example:
python3 ~/Code/comics-reading-order/reading_order.py --file_path=absolute/path/to/text/file.txt --doc_title="Hickman's First Big Run" --file_name=hickmanreadinglist --styling=False
Then, I typically serve that file with simpleHTTPserver:
python3 -m http.server 8000
